


Home Under the Mountain Companion Pieces

by So_Be_It



Series: Home Under the Mountain [2]
Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Smut, Gen, Origin Story, Pranks and Shenanigans, Torture, lots of feels, mentions of depression
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-02
Updated: 2014-12-11
Packaged: 2018-02-11 13:04:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 18
Words: 43,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2069301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/So_Be_It/pseuds/So_Be_It
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What it says on the tin. Some are semi-freestanding ficlets, such as "Chapter One: Origins", and some are more like chapters in a sequel to "Home Under the Mountain". A significant number of the latter are smut. ;)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Origins

**Author's Note:**

> I am trying to post the chapters in a loosely chronological order, a goal which is made somewhat difficult by my own lack of mental organization, and the fact that new ideas about previous events may occur to me later on, when deleting and re-posting chapters just for the sake of a timeline has become daunting and absurd. For this reason, each chapter will have a note somewhere mentioning its approximate location in time and space.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lucy's childhood, or lack thereof, and transition into young adulthood; portrayed in a format which I can best term as a stream of mini-vignettes.  
> Rated T for child neglect, death of family members, and mentions of violence.  
> As one may estimate, this takes place in our world, some years before HUM.

Lucy was three, and the baby was so small, every inch of his skin pink like it was going to bruise. His eyes didn’t open, his fingers didn’t unfurl, his elbows and knees didn’t straighten. Lucy didn’t need to be told to be careful with him, though everyone was sure to tell her anyway. Even at her age, she knew something precious when she saw it. When her grandmother told her that she was a big sister now, that she had to take good care of the baby, she nodded solemnly. She’d known that without being told, too. Nothing bad could ever happen to him. She was the big sister; she would keep him safe.

 

Lucy was seven, and Grandma and Grandpa stopped coming by the house. They told her to be brave, that they loved her, that she could do it, that she was strong. They reminded her to say her rosary, to pray before eating and before bedtime. They left, and her mother’s anger turned into sadness, so deep and heavy she sometimes didn’t leave her bed for days.  
Lucy didn’t understand, but she picked up the slack. She set aside the long minutes it to her to read through the instructions on the side of the macaroni box, watched it revolve inside the microwave carefully with the phone in her hand and 9 and 1 already dialed, just in case she’d done it wrong and it caught fire. She watched her mother do laundry and cook things and run errands, on her good days, so that Lucy could do them herself on the bad days. She couldn’t do everything – the bank was for grown-ups only, Lucy couldn’t drive a car, she had to boost Peter up to reach the mailbox. She couldn’t carry very many groceries at once and people looked at her funny for buying things like milk and bread by herself, so she got used to saying that she was just stopping to get a few things on her way home from school, which quickly became true because it meant she could carry a few things at a time without making lots of trips. The usual clerk at the store started saving the lollipops that broke at the bottom of the box to give her and Peter when they came in on their way from bus stop to house. He called them good kids, helping their mom, and Lucy didn’t tell him that they were lucky if their mother helped them.  
She made sure they said their prayers every night, like her grandparents had reminded her, even though their mother didn’t take them to Mass anymore, and soon instead of the Lord’s Prayer, she and Peter recited a nightly Hail Mary. God had always seemed very scary and far away to Lucy, when she was kneeling in the church staring up at the stained glass, very distant and important, but a mother she could talk to. A mother would listen to them. A mother would want to help them.

 

Lucy was ten, and she hated school, but she had to go. Their mother hated work, but she went to work. Usually. And so Lucy went to school. Usually. If she skipped too much, they called her mother, and they had to go to a meeting where everyone was too serious and asked Lucy’s mother questions she answered in lies while Peter kicked his heels against the legs of his chair, slumped low in the seat so only his head rested against the back, young enough to be bored instead of terrified by the proceedings.  
If she didn’t skip enough, though, Lucy got into fights. The other girls called her poor. They called her a mick, and she didn’t need to know what that meant to hate being called it. They told her she stank, so she started giving herself and Peter a bath every night instead of every other, but it didn’t matter. They called her stupid, so she read books, and when they still called her stupid, she read more books, so she could make them the stupid ones instead.  
She liked books for books’ sake, anyway. Each one contained a small world. A different world, worlds without drawn, silent, sleeping mothers, worlds without little brothers who were always hungry, worlds without scary red stamps on the envelopes in the mail. Other books contained information, valuable information. There was a banner in the library that said Knowledge is power, but she hadn’t needed to be told. She made Peter read, got him books with worlds inside so he could escape. She got him books with information inside so he could learn enough to survive when he realized that you couldn’t live in the worlds inside books, you had to survive in this one. She hoped it was a long time before he realized that. It felt like she’d always known it.  
Lucy made sure Peter said goodnight prayers, though now he chose his own, and sometimes, when she could work it out, they went to Mass again. While the priest talked, she usually just stared at the blue glass panels that formed the falls of the Mother’s gown, imagining kindness and warmth on the pale blank oval of her face.

 

Lucy was twelve, and teachers didn’t call her ‘gifted’ anymore. They called her ‘difficult’ or ‘preoccupied’, on paper, and ‘troublemaker’ or ‘a waste’ when they didn’t think students could hear. She had no use for them, for people who tried to teach her things she already knew, who scolded her when she couldn’t sit still or be quiet, who resented her for reasons she didn’t entirely understand. In retribution, she taunted them, and lazily – correcting their mistakes, which they made too often in her opinion: the correct spelling of platitudinous, the length of the Hundred Years’ War, the failure to use an oxford comma. It made her classmates laugh, but they didn’t like it either, didn’t like knowing that the girl with the ratty hair, the duct-taped shoes, and the welfare mom was smarter than them. Throwing insults had escalated over the years, once it lost its effect, to throwing rocks. Lucy could shrug off harsh words and regard her peers with disdain, but bruises and cuts always showed through her skin. She wore long sleeves year-round, so the teachers wouldn’t accuse her mother. They suspected enough already. They kept referring Lucy and Peter to the school counselors, whom Lucy hated more than teachers. She named the kids who’d bruised her, would have lied and pinned it on them even if it had been her mother, because fuck them. And fuck the counselors, trying to trick her into disaster by offering help. Tell us how you feel. How’s your mother? Do you need help? There are resources. This is a safe place.  
She didn’t trust those offers. She knew about foster homes. She knew that no one would want to adopt her, but someone would want to adopt Peter in a heartbeat – good kid, always smiling, so good even the chickenshit kids they went to school with could see it, so his peers made allowances for him that his sullen sister had never gotten. Peter was invited over for dinners and sleepovers and afternoons playing videogames and eating cookies made by someone else’s mother from scratch – not made by Lucy out of a tube of premade dough which she then burned by forgetting them in the oven because the timer was broken. She burned a lot of food that was, distracted trying to sew a new patch into jeans that were already mostly patches so she wouldn’t have to buy new ones, distracted struggling to read through Plumbing for Dummies so they could have hot water without trying to scare up an impossible four hundred dollars for a plumber just to tell them what was wrong. They still ate it, because they couldn’t afford not to.  
She didn’t read much anymore. There wasn’t time, not when she had to set up job interviews to literally, physically drag her mother to, just to keep the unemployment checks coming in, not when she had to cook and clean and do laundry and juggle the money to stretch across as many minimum-balance-due bills as possible, not when she spent her spare time at the gym two blocks away. The owner pitied her enough to let her in free, so she was there whenever she could find the time, getting stronger and harder and faster so the other kids couldn’t catch her, so the rocks they threw couldn’t hit her. She did read what she was assigned for school, because no matter how many fights she got into, she pulled perfect grades every single time, because fuck them.

 

Lucy was sixteen, and her mother was dead. It had seemed suspicious that she was gone when they got home from school. Lucy had been expecting a phone call, someone saying that her mother was at such-and-such hospital, such-and-such precinct, and she was already angry with her mother over having to dislodge Peter from his homework and dump him at some friend’s house, or worse, having to drag him with her onto the bus and into the subways if no one would take him.  
Lucy didn’t expect cops at the door, but there had been cops there before. Teachers sent them, school nurses sent them, school counselors sent them. Sometimes they came to sniff around Lucy, knowing she left basement ring matches with bloody knuckles. They never had enough evidence or heart to take away either her or her mother, and Lucy lied well anyway. Fluidly, easily, the way that someone could only when they had grown up lying to survive.  
So at the sight of cops, she just crossed her arms and leaned against the frame, lazy and confrontational at once. And they told her.  
Peter came to the door, then, and Lucy pushed him away – gently, she was never hard on him, never mad at him. He was the only person she loved, immeasurably precious, and a good kid besides. He treated her the same way. “Go do your homework,” she said.  
“It’s done,” he replied.  
And the skinnier cop said that no, actually, both of them would have to come with them. They were being taken to a group home until a foster family or other accommodations could be made for them.  
Lucy was still looking at Peter when he realized what that meant, and saw his eyes go flat like doors had slammed down, like a light had gone out.  
It was the worst thing that could happen, the thing that Lucy had been trying, since she was seven years old, to forestall. The end had come, and when they had only needed to last two more years. Lucy was only twenty-two months shy of lucky eighteen.  
She sat herself down in the Department of Family Services once they got there, one hand gripping Peter’s so hard it would end up leaving a mark, and told the authorities they’d have to Tase her to separate them. She wasn’t letting Peter out of her sight – they could have lost each other for days or weeks or months, anything at all could have happened to him when she wasn’t there to protect him. She told their grandparents’ names to the only social worker in the place who seemed genuinely sympathetic. It was only an hour or so before they showed up.

 

Lucy was difficult, troubled, a troublemaker. She argued, she stayed out all hours, she came back sweat-drenched, smelling like beer and blood. She resented the yoke of parenthood, initially, because authority had never done her any good.  
But her grandparents were good, plain, salt-of-the-earth people. They were patient. They were loving. When Lucy swaggered into the house reeking of pot (not that she smoked it, just that she’d sat near someone while they did, for the smell), they ignored it. When she taught Peter how to guard his face behind his fists and aim for the liver, they ignored that, too. When she insisted on keeping her job at the neighborhood gym and refused to go back to school, they didn’t push it. When she cried, they ignored it, until it had been long enough that she didn’t reject the comfort they offered.  
They offered condolences, hot meals, clean laundry, books. Free time. Soft beds. College money. Christmas and birthdays, Mass on Sunday morning, bicycles, a pet cat and a dog, backyard barbeques in the summer, electricity that never went out, pantry shelves that were never empty. And slowly, inexorably, Lucy buckled under the strain of resisting what she wanted with every fiber of her being. It took years for her to trust it completely, to really believe that the situation was forever, that life didn’t have to be an uphill battle, and even then, sometimes, she was afraid if her grandparents slept past nine am. 

 

Lucy was eighteen. She had adopted and abandoned a major in linguistics at the local university, shifted her focus to the undergraduate prerequisites for medical school. Books still bewitched her, had been the bridge to her love of language, but she too-well remembered long, tense, frightened hours in the cold free clinic of her childhood neighborhood, and she had an aptitude for first aid. The clean, complex logic of the human body made the same kind of sense to her as the clean, complex structures of language, patterns inside of patterns, interlocking knowledge like mental puzzle pieces. She wanted to pay her good fortune forward. She wanted to make her grandparents proud.  
She laughed often, walked freely, fought for fun, at the gym, instead of fear in schoolyards or profit in garages. She attended college but lived at home. She was friendly with her peers, but not really friends. Too few of them knew enough of hardship to relate to her, or the other way around.  
Lucy wrestled with her younger brother, short-sheeted his bed, stuck his hand in warm water when he fell asleep in front of the TV, put rubber cat vomit on his homework. And he put jacks in her gym shoes, salt in her oatmeal, temporary hair dye in her shampoo. They cooked dinner together, traded the stories of their day as they folded laundry. They drank beer pilfered from their grandfather’s ‘secret’ minifridge in the garage while sitting on the ceiling of the back porch as they stargazed, one of Lucy’s hands always just behind her brother, so she could catch him by the belt if he started to slide. The grim, quiet days of their childhoods were almost forgotten, made up for with interest.

 

Their grandfather died, and there was no condolence that could be offered that made it okay – that he’d had a good life, a long life, that he’d gone peacefully in his sleep. They made it worse, actually, because Lucy was already breaking under the weight of caring for her bereaved grandmother, of keeping up with the housework and the neverending casseroles people brought them, of pretending interest in the inane, banal anecdotes strangers told her about her grandfather, the platitudes they offered. She recited prayers to Mary almost constantly in her head, like a radio station that only played the same ten-odd songs on loop, because even without the insufferable suggestions of strangers, it was hard enough to get by. It was hard enough to make the arrangements, stare at the coffins, think about things like seepage and compromised seams, to pick a suit for him to wear to the grave, to pick a dress for her grandmother and one for herself, and get Peter fitted for a suit, too, and it felt horribly morbid for his first suit to be for a funeral, so she bought two – one for him to wear to prom or church or anywhere but the cemetery, and the second one, rung up entirely separately, bought on a later day, for the funeral. He outgrew the former before he ever wore it, but that didn’t matter.  
All of that was hard enough, without people suggesting that Lucy’s pain, so carefully wound tight and contained, should be less because of the manner in which he had died. It was bullshit down to the syllable, and it filled her with so much rage that she kept hiding in the linen closet during the wake, screaming into spare pillows. No matter how much time you had with someone, it was never enough. No matter how they went, it was horrible. No matter what, death hurt so badly it felt like you were dying. Suggesting anything else was a lie, and cruel one.

 

Lucy was twenty. She frequented bars for the fun of watching others drunk, for the social aspect, because that was where her friends wanted to be now that she could pass as old enough to join them (as long as she didn’t try to buy a drink herself), all of them older than her, more seasoned than most people her own age, easier to talk to, to relate to.  
She now sometimes wandered away from her grandparent’s home, but always returned, stretching and snapping like a rubber band. She went on adventures, between semesters at college – humanitarian work, usually, to rebuild towns after hurricanes, to build clinics in South America, volunteering once on an archaeological dig, taking jaunts with her few friends into the odder corners of the city, or out into the wilderness to hike and climb. She always returned sunburned and smiling, relating new misadventures, showing off a new scar or bruise, newly-learned snippets of some foreign language courtesy of her almost-career as a linguist, and once, after visiting India, giardia. Sometimes she borrowed the family dog, Annabelle Lee, for long walks or hikes or camping trips. She tried living on her own, always returning on Sundays to visit, go to Mass, eat dinner, sleep over in her old bed, but it was a failed experiment. She couldn’t stand being away from her family. It was too practical to live at home, she said aloud, but really it was too comforting, to be surrounded always by the people who loved her, to feel that love like an anchoring weight.  
She and Peter often curled up in the window seat together like little kids to read, occasionally trading comments or suggestions, or reminiscing. Lucy often tucked her chin over the bell of his skull, though Peter was by then so tall that he had to curl his spine like a fiddlehead fern to fit tucked against her as the little spoon. She often thought that soon, they’d have to stop sitting like this, her back to the wall, his back to her chest, because people already thought it was weird, because soon he’d really be too big to fit, by any stretch of the imagination or contortion of his frame. She often thought that no matter what else she did or didn’t do, she’d halfway raised her brother, and he was good and kind and well-adjusted, and no matter what else her life came to, that was already enough.


	2. The Kid

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where and how Lucy learned to fight. Overlaps significantly, in time and place, with "Origins". If anyone's curious, I've been imagining her living in either Boston or Philly. I'm not particular.  
> Rated T for mentions of unexplained violence against a child (explanation can be surmised from content of previous chapter), language, isolation and depression.

There was a kid in Mikey’s gym. It wasn’t an entirely uncommon occurrence – sometimes a patron’s children or younger siblings wandered in, often tired of waiting in the car or at home, sometimes seeking their father or brother or uncle to report that someone was in jail or the hospital.  
This kid was a girl, maybe twelve, but small for her age, skinny, with ratty hair, wearing jeans that used to be nice and a long-sleeved button-up shirt despite the summer swelter. Her posture didn’t suggest that she was here to drag someone urgently home. It also didn’t seem like she was just bored. “Looking for someone, sweetheart?” he asked, and she shook her head.  
“Water fountain,” she said. “I was walking by, and it’s hot, and I figured a gym . . .”  
Mikey pointed to the fountain, near the fire exit, and the kid passed him on her way to drink. “What’re you doin’ dressed like that, in this weather?” he demanded. The AC was going full blast, ceiling fans whirring, and still he was so hot that his wifebeater and basketball shorts clung to him like a second skin.  
The kid shrugged, swiped her sleeve over her mouth. “Looking for a job.”  
He snorted. No one would hire a kid that age, even if they didn’t care about a violation of child labor laws. She was too scrawny for any decent work in a kitchen or a storeroom, too obviously young for any work in the front of the house. “You’d better run home to your mama,” he said.  
“That’s what they tell me,” the kid said, and bobbed down to drink from the fountain again. Mikey leaned back against the wall to keep an eye on her, watching two of his regulars spar in the ring. The kid moved to stand next to him, enthralled.  
“What are they doing?”  
“Krav maga,” he replied. “Shit’ll mess you up.”  
“I want to learn,” she said immediately.  
Another snort. “People in hell want Slurpees, kid.”  
“I’ll work to pay for it,” the kid offered.  
“You can watch,” Mikey allowed, and the kid did. She stayed until quarter to four and then hurried out like she had someplace to be, and the next day she was back, with an even smaller kid at her side, his fingers hooked in the belt loops of her jeans. Jeans again, and long sleeves.  
“Whoa, whoa,” Mikey said. “Who’s this?”  
“My brother,” the kid replied. The brother stared up at him with round eyes, clearly impressed. Mike sported a graying buzz cut, sleeveless shirt, shorts, ink. His face betrayed him as in his mid-forties, but he had the physique of someone fifteen years younger. He wasn’t surprised he made an impression. “I couldn’t get anyone to watch him.”  
“He’s a pain in my ass, you’re out,” Mikey warned. He ran a nice place, clean and neat, a few ex-convicts among his clientele but nothing serious, no drama allowed. But the kids didn’t screw it up. They were quiet, unobtrusive, stayed in the corner. Good kids. The boy read a book while the girl watched people spar, one foot bouncing against the ground, her fingers tapping anxiously on her knees, obviously jonesing to move.  
The third time she showed up, it was without the baby brother, but with a black eye. “Where the fuck’d you get that?” Mikey demanded, catching her with fingers around her chin, angling her face up to the fluorescents.  
Her jaw set up, muscles hardening against his fingers. “Not telling,” she said.  
Mikey took in the sight of her. Sweatpants today, probably a concession to the swelling heat wave, and finally a damn t-shirt, which showed older bruises gone yellow on her arms – unnoticeable if not looked for. He stared for a minute, studied the black eye again.  
“You do stretches,” he said finally. “Like in PE at school. They still got PE?” She nodded against his hand, and he let go of her chin. “Good. So do some stretches, then run laps till you’re sweaty, and go see the big guy in the camo. Name’s Patty.”  
The kid’s eyes wandered over to Patty, taking in the shiny, shaved head, the chapped, callused hands, the neck tattoo. “Patty’s a girl’s name.”  
“Don’t tell him that. Scoot. Stretch. Run. Now. When Patty’s done with you, you stay, and I’ll get you a broom.” The kid nodded again. He went back to his office to answer the phone – sometimes he hallucinated the sound of it ringing, even when he wasn’t in the building – and when he returned twenty minutes later, the kid was doing dogged but determined jumping jacks under Patty’s suspicious gaze. He met Mikey’s eyes, flicked his own to his new pupil. Mikey shrugged, hands in his pockets. What could you do?

 

She came in at least once a week after that, sometimes as many as five times. She learned fast, and fought hard, ferocious like a cornered animal to the point that sometimes Patty had to reign her in to keep her from hurting herself. Patty spoke her praises to Mike, and after a year or two he passed her to his buddy who taught aikido at the community center, and then to a guy who taught muay thai out of his basement, but she always came back to Mike’s gym. She was a serious kid, intent, with dark, staring eyes. She had to be poked and prodded into laughing, the regulars who’d come to recognize her teasing, coaxing, until the smiles came more frequently.  
She swept and mopped and wiped down equipment, jimmied the water fountain into working again when it broke, changed light bulbs, printed promo flyers and took them with her to post around the neighborhood. She ate food when it was offered, but only after watching someone else eat the same thing first, always suspicious. Mikey got used to packing two sandwiches for lunch, just in case she showed, found a dinged-up old water bottle for her to use, took it home every few days to wash it out, left to dry in the dish rack beside his own bottle. He got used to her silent presence, her quick, sure step at his side, to watching new gym members closely when they interacted with her, just in case, until they fell into the same indulgent attitude as the old crowd.  
Once he caught her spinning a throwing star around her finger like it was a rubber band, shocked and horrified to see her with something so sharp and dangerous. It had been a gift (an expensive gift, and therefore probably stolen) from one of his more criminally inclined members, one with poor judgment who thought the kid was cute and the sight of her with a razor-edged weapon amusing. Mike let him leave the gym that day with his kneecaps intact only after he’d promised to teach the kid how to handle the throwing stars properly.  
His initial instinct had been to get rid of the star entirely, and the man who’d supplied it, too, but he knew the kid wouldn’t put up with that. She wasn’t the type to be told what to do like – well, like a kid, even if she was one. She was a sharpshooter at the dart board in his office, anyway, so he figured the skill would translate, and it did. She picked up knives after that, and though he didn’t like it, he did like the whoops of glee that sometimes sounded from the back alley when she was practicing, her projectiles more often than not striking the bulls-eye of the target he’d spray-painted onto a piece of scrap wood.  
“What’s your name?” Mikey asked one day, when he suddenly realized that he was getting old, and the kid had grown hips and a chest. Her hair wasn’t ratty anymore, and her clothes fit, though they were still obviously secondhand.  
“Lucy,” she said, and flashed him a smile around the bench-press she was wiping down. “Don’t get weird just ‘cuz I finally grew boobs, Mike.”  
He laughed, and she threw her rag at him.  
He worried about her. Sometimes she came in bruised. Someone told him that he’d seen her at an underground boxing match, an all-female ring but no less serious than the men’s league. Bare-knuckle.  
“You oughta stop with that shit,” he said when she came in with a broken nose. “You seen a doctor for that?”  
She ignored him pressing his thumbs against her cheekbones where they rose into the bridge of her nose, testing for more fractures. Her eyes teared at the pain, though she didn’t twitch. “I’ve got a brother to feed,” she said, and he remembered the brother, the blond kid with the book, though he hadn’t seen him in years.  
“Work here,” he said, and he got her a W-2, started paying her for the sweeping and mopping and wiping, not much pay, but what he could afford, and while it wasn’t as much as the fighting paid, she didn’t have to worry about going home dead, or getting jumped by a vengeful opponent in the alley.  
Sometimes she slept in the storeroom, then slipped out into the back alley to walk in again like she hadn’t spent the night, terrycloth pattern imprinted on her cheek from the towels. Once he caught her crying in there, and she confessed that her mother had jumped off a bridge, and she didn’t know how to be good for her grandparents. “Good’s easy,” he assured her, wiping at her tears with his thumbs, smoothing them over her cheekbones. “You’re the best kid I know.”  
She wasn’t a constant presence, always coming and going, still sometimes showing up with purple marks under her skin, but he knew better than to say anything. She took over more and more of the office work as his gut finally gave up and went to fat, and drank beer with him after they closed up for the night, feet kicked up on the desk in the back, where at some point he’d placed a second chair so she had one of her own. She was a grown woman now, not a kid, but he still called her that, still watched her with the new gym members, just in case they got nasty ideas, still watched her tape her knuckles to make sure she wouldn’t get hurt. He felt pride as he watched her thump man after man after man into the mats like it was easy, always relieved to see her bounce back up when she was the one who got thumped, even though he knew full well that she bordered on indestructible.  
He’d never been married, never had a kid, but it probably felt like this. The fondness and the familiarity, the pride and the worry. While he knew she had a family – a good one now, not whatever shit she’d lived with as a kid – he was glad she never mentioned a dad. He still took her water bottle home and washed it with his own, still packed two sandwiches. He knew how she liked her food, knew when she’d gotten each piercing (that he could see), knew the few weak spots she always left in her defenses, because sometimes they sparred in the evenings, when everyone else was gone, and it was more like dancing. He wondered if she knew how to dance, if soon she’d get married, if he’d be invited and have a last chance to dust off the old suit at the back of his closet, usually brought out for funerals.  
Then, one week, she missed three shifts in a row. Her cellphone rang out to voicemail every time. He figured out how to text just to send her a few messages, but they were unanswered. He asked the regulars, the ones who’d known her since she really was a kid, asked the younger, newer guys who flirted with her when they didn’t think Mikey was looking.  
He dug through his desk to find her W-2, but Lucy did the filing and the recordkeeping these days and he couldn’t find it. He knew she had grandparents, so he asked about them next, and one of the older guys said he’d seen Lucy and a couple of old folks at his church every now and then. He even mentioned the younger brother.  
So Mikey went to the church, and asked the priest, and the priest looked them up in the parish directory and called to ask if he could give their information to a friend of their granddaughter.  
Mike wound up on their doorstep the same day, scrubbing his hand through his thinning, whitening buzz cut to make it stand straight, wishing he’d changed out of his work clothes, but all he really owned were sweats and t-shirts and tracksuits.  
It was the brother who answered the door, now a teenager, built along the same sturdy lines as his sister, but about six inches taller. He stared at Mike through the screen door for a moment before recognition lit his red-rimmed eyes. Mikey didn’t like the look of those eyes, or the uneven pink splotches on his cheeks, the same as the kid got when she’d been crying, which Mike well remembered even though he’d only seen it once.  
“You own the gym where Lucy works,” the brother said.  
It was amazing to realize how separate she’d kept the parts of her life. Mike wondered what else the brother didn’t know, what else he himself didn’t know.  
“Yeah, is she around?” he asked. She’d been gone before, sometimes for weeks, sure, but she’d always warned him. Good employee. Good kid.  
“She went up to Canada with some friends last weekend,” the brother reported, and his mouth started to wobble before it flattened into a firm line. “To do some climbing. She left a note saying she’d gone to get in a last climb around dawn the morning they were supposed to leave.”  
Mikey felt soft, old wood splinter against his fingers and palm, realized that he was gripping the doorframe hard, leaning against it, the other hand on his knee. His vision was going black at the edges, there was a rushing sound in his ears. This was what a heart attack felt like, he should have listened to that fucking doctor about steak and mayonnaise. His chest hurt, his heart hurt, it hurt like a broken bone, sharp and demanding. “Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, Jesus. When did she – is there a funeral?”  
“They can’t find her,” the brother said, and he started crying, helplessly, leaning on his side of the doorframe. In a moment an old woman was there, wrapping an arm around the kid and pushing the screen door open with the other, inviting Mikey in, and he stumbled over the threshold like someone older than he was, even at his age, only realizing that he was crying when he had to blink back tears to look around, to take in green-upholstered living room furniture, the framed picture of Lucy on the side table, scowling, in one of those pictures obviously taken at school. A matching picture sat beside it, the brother, all dimples as he grinned. There were more pictures on the walls, on the mantelpiece over the fireplace, and he realized he didn’t have even one. He’d have to take one, get a picture of the two of them in front of the gym to hang in the office. And he realized it was bizarre that he’d never been here, never met the grandparents, rarely met the brother, whose name he’d either never learned or had long forgotten.  
Peter, he learned, and the old woman was Deirdre, and the grandfather had been John, though he was dead now. The parents went unmentioned, absent from any of the photographs on display. Mikey didn’t ask. He drank the tea Deirdre made him and tried to listen as Peter painfully, painstakingly laid down what the Canadian police and park rangers and the FBI knew, which was next to nothing, but Mike couldn’t concentrate. He burned his tongue on the tea and didn’t feel it.  
They told him to come back, when he left, to keep checking in, and he knew he would. He had to, had to know, had to be there the minute she was back, to hug her and scrub his knuckles in her hair (which she pretended to hate), to squeeze her muscled arms and tease that she’d gone soft while she was away, to tell her that he still had her water bottle, that he still knew her favorite flavor of ice cream and brand of beer.  
And he did go back. He ate dinner with them every Sunday, taught Peter how to work the grill in the backyard in the summer, and the fireplace in the winter, and eventually, somehow, he ended up there for Christmas and Easter and Peter’s birthday, and even his own birthday, which had previously gone uncelebrated besides Lucy bringing him a cupcake. She’d found his birthday on some form, one year, and had never forgotten after that.  
Every year brought the anniversary of her disappearance around like ripping the scab off a wound so it couldn’t heal, and he ran the gym like normal, smiled and laughed like normal, and then sat in his office in the dark after closing, sipping beer as slowly as he could, praying he’d hear the telltale sound of her key in the lock.  
Eventually he had to hire someone else. He was too old to do everything himself, these days, and his blood pressure had gone to shit. He just couldn’t do it alone like he had before Lucycame along, and Peter was in college and had a job at the library. Always reading. Mikey had been shocked to learn that Lucy had been in college too, a med student, though she’d always been handy with the first aid kit.  
He kept packing an extra sandwich, all through the inexorable years. He took up drinking her beer, instead of his, so he didn’t have to make excuses about keeping it in the minifridge under the desk. He didn’t let himself think about it, didn’t address it, didn’t label it, but it was a pained blend of superstition and hope, hope that one day she’d come back, like she always did, older and harder, new scars and new jokes, that she’d swagger through the office door with that weird blend of confidence and limp, and she’d drop into her chair to swing her sneakers up onto the desk, hair maybe shorter, or maybe loose, instead of bound up in the familiar ponytail, but still Lucy after all of it. Still his kid.


	3. Candle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lucy seeks a candle to light in thanks to Mary after surviving the Battle of Five Armies. This isn't my favorite piece, but Lucy's personal religion is important to her, so I felt that I should include it despite my dissatisfaction with how it turned out (I did try reworking it multiple times, but I ended up beating a dead horse).  
> Time and place are a little funky here only because this occurred during HUM, but was not mentioned in that piece (it messed up my flow, which is actually how a number of pieces ended up in here instead of there).  
> Rated T for medical drug use, mention of severe character injury (to multiple characters).

Days after the Battle, when all else had fallen to calm and mourning and cleanup, the healers’ tents were still hives of frantic activity. The healers slept where and when they could and rose after whatever meager time was granted them, streaked and smeared with blood, the coloration of the stain suggesting its age, the darkest splotches originating in the first frenzy of the Battle. The patients screamed or wailed or moaned, stared at the walls, dozed in the fitful manner of someone whose drug dosage was calculated hastily and under duress. Some lay dead in their cots for long hours before they were noticed and removed. The air was heavy and rank with the stink of vomit and putrefying flesh.  
Lucy needed a candle. She asked, but no one could or would get one for her. Healers were busy. It seemed that Kili was arriving to see her every few minutes, relieved to find her every time, always stroking back her hair, but after a few moments his gaze was inexorably drawn in the direction of his brother and uncle, lying wounded in another tent, and just as frequently, he left again. Beorn was gone. She hadn’t seen Gandalf or Bilbo, though Kili said they were alive. Legolas had visited her once, briefly, and given her a deep, mournful look that managed to convey an awful lot without words – or perhaps that was because the drugs they gave her for the pain made everything seem dreamy-intense and deeply dimensional.  
She needed a candle. She needed one, intensity again possibly due to the drugs. She could hook that suspicion together, but not discount the desire. Candle.  
It seemed a simple enough goal, and she could walk short distances now, even if aided by a healer’s hands under her elbows. She hadn’t realized how much of her weight the healer had borne until she took the first two steps and her vision went a little gray at the edges, but she could still do it. Cross to the nearest exit, flaps pinned open in a desperate bid for the wind to flush out the stench of death.  
The fresh air on her face had an invigorating effect. Find a candle. Storeroom. Supply tent. It was easier to walk with the bracing wind clearing her mind. Maybe the air in the tent was so bad the oxygen levels were actually low. It felt like it, in comparison to the air outside, even if it, too, stank with rot and blood. The ground was a soupy mess.  
The effect of the cleaner air was fading by the time she found a series of small chests lined up along the outside of a tent wall. Not a healing tent, maybe a mess. She didn’t care. It took an effort to kneel slowly, carefully, because her knees wanted to buckle under the breathlessness and under the pain pulsing red behind her eyes, nudging its way through the drugs, but she had enough strength to kneel properly, knowing she’d regret pitching to the ground if she let herself.  
The first chest held lanterns, glass and metal winking from the curled strands of straw that padded them from one another and the sides of the chest. The lid had been almost impossible to lift, for the effort required and for trying to negotiate the task without the use of her left arm. Lucy methodically shifted down the line. The next chest held the same, but that was good, she was looking at things that made light. Candles made light. Logically, things of like nature would be kept together.  
She had to pause, though, before moving to the third chest, as her vision swam a little. Deeper breaths. She’d been breathing shallowly, too shallowly – the healer made her breathe so deeply it felt like the bones were breaking again, five times in a row three times a day, to keep her ribs set properly, and Lucy breathed almost that deeply now. The lancing pain made her drooping eyelids rise as much as the improved circulation of air in her lungs.  
Third chest. Her fingers fumbled the latch; she focused, got it open, struggled to lift the weight of the lid. Too heavy; it fell with a clunk.  
Kili found her there, kneeling unevenly in the mud, draped over the curved lid of the chest to rest before taking another go. “Thank Mahal,” he said, crouching beside her. The urge to grab onto her was almost irrepressible, but there was no safe way to embrace her at the moment. “What are you doing out here, khalegh?”  
“Need a candle,” Lucy said, eyes closed.  
“It’s daytime, Lucy, you don’t need a candle,” Kili answered in a patient, reasonable voice that caused Lucy a stir of irritation even in her current state. Mahal, what are those elves giving her, and how much of it? Clearly enough to addle her slightly, though not enough to keep her from hopping out of bed and wandering across the Mountainside. She was talking, though, that was an improvement, since so far she’d mostly stared at the wall or the ground with slightly glazed eyes, in a way that was wholly disturbing. “Come back to the tent.”  
She resisted him trying to draw her up, leaning back against his hand on her good arm with enough weight that he was afraid to keep pulling even as he was afraid to let go. “I need a candle,” Lucy insisted.  
“Alright, we’ll get one,” Kili conceded quickly, and Lucy relaxed. He carefully let go of her, lifting the lid of the chest before them. It was, thankfully, filled with candles, laid down in neat rows in a bed of straw. Lucy stared for several seconds, and then selected one with care.  
“Good?” he asked.  
She nodded, and then looked down at it. “Need to light it.”  
“Back at the tent,” Kili said quickly. Aulë, she was almost as bad off as Gloin, who was kept completely unconscious except for the odd moments when he swam up out of the drugs to offer strange, disjointed comments in a slurred voice. Thorin was hardly any better. It seemed that half the Company was horribly insensible.  
It took some work getting Lucy to her feet, and more to get her to walk back, but Kili didn’t know how to negotiate carrying her with her back the way it was. He marveled that she’d made it so far on her own in the first place. One of the healers spotted them coming, when they were close, and hurried out to help. “And where did we get to?” she asked Lucy, easing an arm around her waist, under the damage to her ribs, to grip her by the elbows.  
“I needed a candle,” Lucy replied perfunctorily, as if the explanation did not raise more questions that it answered.  
“That’s a very nice candle,” the healer agreed, as if her patient were feeble-minded, and Kili almost laughed at the dark look Lucy gave the Elf for her tone. There probably weren’t enough drugs in Middle Earth to make Lucy take kindly to being patronized. And it was a relief to see more of her old self than he had in days, drugs and pain acting as they did.  
The Elf left them on the cot once she had checked Lucy over for new or worsened injuries. Kili dug his chips of flint and steel out of his pocket, relieved to find them, since he hadn’t changed clothes since the Battle and could no longer be sure what he did and didn’t have on his person.  
It was short work to light a spare scrap of linen, cut from some bandaging, and to hold the flame to the wick of the candle until it caught. Lucy regarded the small, wavering flame for a moment, and then bowed her head over it.  
Kili felt foolish when he realized that she was praying. Of course she’d had a good reason, even drugged and injured, to leave the healers’ tent. There weren’t enough drugs in Middle Earth to addle her wits, after all.  
He wrapped his hands around hers, on the candle, and bowed his head, his forehead just brushing against the side of her head. Lucy turned into the gesture, brow meeting brow, and murmured, “Blessed Mary, who can worthily give you the just dues of praise and thanksgiving, you who by the wondrous assent of your will rescued a fallen world? What songs of praise can our weak nature recite in your honor, since it is by your intervention alone that it has found the way to restoration? Accept, then, such poor thanks as we have to offer here, though they be unequal to your merit; and, receiving our vows, obtain by your prayers the remission of our offenses. Carry our prayers within the sanctuary of the heavenly audience and bring forth the gift of our reconciliation . . .”  
It was a prayer beautiful and strange, a little unsettling, heavy with ritual, and obviously well-worn with recital, judging by the rhythm of Lucy’s voice. It seemed, to Kili, an apt metaphor for faith itself, especially the way the words and phrases kept echoing back in his mind long after Lucy had concluded the prayer and fallen asleep against his shoulder.  
Beautiful and strange and a little unsettling. He turned his head to kiss hers, and sent up his own prayers of thanksgiving to Mahal before extinguishing the candle, setting it aside easily within Lucy’s reach and field of view, should she want it again when she awoke.


	4. Afterwards

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some weeks after the Battle of Five Armies, almost everyone is well-enough recovered from their injuries to move from the healers' halls to live with family or friends. Lucy is trucking right along, pulling herself together in her quiet way, but Kili hasn't experienced a trauma like the Battle before and he doesn't know what to do with it.  
> Rated T for post-traumatic stress, borderline depression, mentions of serious character injury.

It was a relief to be out of the healers’ halls, a relief to have a mind unclouded by drugs or pain or strange dreams that blurred with reality. There was still pain, but it was easily manageable. And though Lucy only left one stone room under the Mountain for another, at least the smell outside of the healers’ realm was mineral, and not rancid. The odor given off by several dozen wounds going to gangrene in an enclosed space was indescribable.  
Kili was just as relieved to see her out and about, if also a little worried. Lucy had discontinued any drugs for the pain beyond willowbark tea long before any healer advised the course of action, and he could tell that it was nothing like enough – especially when the human healer rode in from Dale to see to her once in the morning and once in the evening. The healer removed the sling, then, and drew her arm to and fro, stretching, testing the range of movement, and while he did Lucy set her jaw and stared at the floor. She didn’t make a sound even when the pain made her eyes water faster than she could blink it back.  
Afterwards, she would tuck herself against Kili’s side. It had probably been the drugs that let her do so the first time, in the tents outside, because otherwise the idea of seeking out comfort that way would have seemed unfamiliar to the point of uncomfortable. It had quickly become habit, though, and Kili was happy to hold her.  
He wished that he didn’t need to let go to attend to other things, that he could stay on her cot in the tent for days, but there were other matters that required his attention – principally the few Wargs still loose on the Mountainside. After the Battle of Five Armies, Dain and the Elves had returned to their respective homes, the Humans had gone to rebuild both Esgaroth and Dale, and whatever Orcs and Goblins had not been slaughtered had fled. A number of their mounts had been abandoned, and were wreaking havoc. Balin assigned everyone who was fit and able to patrols that daily sallied out to track and dispatch the creatures.  
There was also his brother, who the healers had released on the same day as Lucy. She had noted the sling on his right arm immediately, mirror to her left, and observed, “Well, at least between the two of us, we may come out alright.”  
He’d chuckled, and Kili had been amazed, since his brother had been understandably gloomy ever since the healers stopped speaking of infection and began speaking of recovery, and spoke of low expectations indeed.  
Thorin was still bedridden and largely silent. Fili spent more time with him than Kili could bear to, as he’d always been the more dutiful brother.  
Balin was orchestrating restoration efforts in the Western region of Erebor, directing soldiers in the work of readying quarters for themselves and the Company. Many of Dain’s soldiers had volunteered to remain, lured by the promise of steady work restoring the kingdom, and even more so by the gold, lying ready to be given in payment. Those of the Company who could do so worked with Balin, supervising and assisting, and those who couldn’t focused on resting and healing. Kili fell into the former camp, and so was forced to leave Lucy and Fili to themselves for most of the day.  
Somewhere in the back of his mind, Kili had expected that if everyone lived, there would be rejoicing of some kind. He hadn’t expected the grim quiet that echoed through the halls of Erebor, or the hollow feeling in his stomach. He watched his brother and uncle and lover stretching and strengthening injured tissue, and was glad they had lived, but at the same time he remembered blood and carnage and sometimes had to look away from the reminders. He helped rebuild and restore, but sometimes an odd mood came over him where it all seemed pointless and depressing, and he only wanted to latch onto Fili or Lucy or even Thorin, had Thorin been himself, and hide for a while. He even wished his mother were there, although the thought embarrassed him. At other times, he felt so frustrated with everything and everyone, including himself, that the feeling bordered on anger. At those times he usually did seek Lucy out – an easy task, since she wasn’t very mobile at the time – and he could feel calm again, if not particularly content. It felt good to be there in case she needed him, in case some previously hidden distress surfaced, in case she needed help with some task that couldn’t be accomplished one-handed.  
Even so, everything seemed strange and sad and usually quite senseless, and Kili didn’t want to think about it, much less remember the horrifying events that had led to this disjointed feeling.  
Lucy fared better. She knew this routine, although she had never seen battle before. She knew how to pick up the pieces and fit them back together. She could sit still, in quiet, for hours. She knew how to let emotions wash through her like water. They carved out an empty space in doing so, a hollow feeling, but she knew that that, too, would pass. Years of loneliness and heartache had trained her to recovery in a way that most people couldn’t fathom.  
Kili supposed that he liked holding her, now, as much because he could hope to absorb some of that strength as because he wanted to bolster her, too. 

 

On her first night in Erebor, Lucy gingerly settled herself against him the way she’d grown used to doing after weeks in the healers’ hall.  
The bed seemed oddly luxuriant after weeks on a cot, and Lucy wondered if she could actually sleep in a normal position on the forgiving mattress – her arrangement with Kili involved him reclined against the wall while she leaned back against him on just her uninjured side. It kept the pressure off her fragmented ribs, and her bound arm didn’t weigh so heavily on her chest that breathing was difficult, as it was if she tried to lie on her back. If she tried to lie on her side, the bound arm ached for hanging so awkwardly from her shoulder, and lying on her stomach caused both pain and numbness.  
The awkward sleeping arrangement seemed like it should be uncomfortable for Kili, but he assured her that it wasn’t. Lucy had little choice but to believe him, not if she wanted to sleep more than a fitful hour or two.  
She was drifting off to sleep already when he spoke.  
“Do we just try to forget?”  
There had been no privacy in a communal hall, and always there were other injured people trying fitfully to sleep. He’d blurted out the question weighing on his mind without really intending to. Lucy was quiet for long enough before she answered that Kili was sure she was asleep.  
“You can’t forget.” Lucy watched the firelight move over the wall. “Don’t try. You’ll addle your mind like that.”  
Kili ran one of her curls through his fingers, watched the long strand of hair go straight, and then bounce back when released. “Then what should I do?”  
“Make yourself remember,” she said, and while he didn’t worry about her recovering from the experience, the flat tone in her voice still made his chest ache. “Tell yourself the story of what happened over and over. Every time you make it to the end, you teach yourself the memory has no power. It can’t kill you. After a while, it won’t scare you as much. It won’t hurt as much. Because you think about it all the time anyway, it won’t surprise you when thoughts or memories crop up, and the surprise the worst part.”  
“Worse than the pain?” Because it hurt to remember, the image of his brother bleeding out on the ground was imprinted on his mind’s eye like a scar, and it gripped his heart like a vice every time he saw it. He could still hear Lucy’s bones crunch. He was glad he hadn’t been looking when Thorin was injured.  
“Pain is pain,” Lucy replied. “It hurts, but either it gets better or you get used to it. You hold onto the good things to counteract it. To fill the empty feeling.” Kili squeezed her hand, and Lucy craned her neck as much as her back would allow so she could look back at him. “I think for you, it will get better,” she remarked.  
“And you?” Kili asked, frowning.  
“I’m already used to it,” Lucy said, and settled herself against him again. She didn’t fall asleep as quickly as she had begun to do before he spoke, so she knew that Kili, too, was awake for a short time, but he didn’t say anything else. Neither did she, even though she wanted to. You are my good thing. I was alone for years, but already I love you so much I don’t think I could go back to it. Hold onto me, too.


	5. Hunting a Lost World

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter could just have accurately been entitled, "Brooding". It mostly came to me because I know Lucy could not easily come to decide to give up on her search and settle in with Kili. She doesn't make weighty decisions lightly, nor would most people/characters easily give up on a seven-year mission, or the idea of going home.  
> But in this case, Dorothy stays in Oz, and here is some insight into that thought process.  
> General audiences.

Lucy took a deep, even breath, forcing her ribcage to expand. The familiar stab of pain made a good anchor. She knew that there was nothing lurking under Erebor that could not be dispatched by the combined efforts of Kili, Gandalf, and herself, but that didn’t lessen her dislike for the dark. The sling and binding still restraining her left arm didn’t help, either.  
“More light?” Kili suggested, watching her pupils widen fruitlessly.   
Gandalf’s staff blazed brighter in response, and the wizard turned to look at them. “Better?” he asked Lucy.  
“Yes, thank you.” Lucy let out a short breath, not quite a sigh, and studied Kili. The strong, direct light from the staff cast everything into harsh relief and shadow.   
He offered a smile. It was easy to guess the direction of her thoughts, which drew his the same way. All things told, Kili supposed he’d taken her bizarre revelation well in stride. It wasn’t every day that one heard about people falling from one world into the next – in fact, he’d never heard of it at all.   
It was every day that he felt love so deep and true that it made his heart hurt like it was overfull. It tended to make certain details seem much less urgent than others would probably find them. Lucy’s peculiar origin was one such detail.  
Less urgent, but no less important. He understood that the issue was intensely important, and now he better understood Lucy’s early reluctance to form any kind of serious tie with him. Now that she had, her heart was surely being pulled in two – half to him, if he was being generous about his place in her affections, and half to the possibility of home.  
The dilemma would only worsen if they actually found what Gandalf called the ‘anomaly’ – the bright water he and Lucy had searched for before the Battle of Five Armies, which he had quite forgotten since. Kili could not imagine being forced to choose between his family and his beloved, but he realized that he, too, might have to make that choice, if the anomaly were found and Lucy asked him to go with her. The idea made his head hurt.  
The odds were not good, however, that they would find another anomaly. Lucy had been hunting for one for nearly seven years before she met Kili.   
The trio searched in near-silence, Gandalf occasionally remarking that he felt nothing unusual, although it hardly needed saying. The caverns they searched were nondescript to a one. Lucy tried not to hold Kili’s hand too tightly, but frequently realized that her grip had tightened when her mind wandered.  
And wander it did. She thought more of home now than she had lately, remembering her grandparents’ house, the arrangement of furniture that had not changed since before she was born, the water stain on her bedroom ceiling, the way the air in the kitchen always reverted to the smell of boiled pasta even when no one had made pasta in days. If time had progressed in a parallel manner, Peter would be twenty-four. Her grandmother would be seventy-two, if still alive. The family dog would either be prodigiously old, or buried in the backyard with the cat and the three goldfish Peter had gone through before their grandparents put an end to that.  
It felt like she was being pulled forward, even though forward consistently revealed no change in the featureless rock walls, and she knew that it was a sort of delusion. She didn’t know which way to go to get home, so her body decided on just moving forward.  
If an anomaly suddenly did reveal itself, she had no way of knowing what she should or would do. If no one else, she still had a brother, in her world. A brother who probably still watched the door, still skimmed the police blotter, still had her favorite mugs in the cabinets and books on the shelves. She couldn’t picture anywhere but their house, their grandparents’ house. He probably couldn’t move for fear that she would find her way back there, even though the ghosts of the dead and missing would likely haunt him in the old family home.  
Maybe he had a wife. Or a husband. Peter had never really dated, only seventeen when she disappeared, so she didn’t know. At the very least she hoped he had a pet. It was strange trying to picture him as an adult, trying to imagine someone other than the kid in the window seat with the book, only Ori’s age, his head popping up like a jack-in-the-box when he heard her key in the door. She wondered if he still worked at the library, if he had gone into linguistics studies like he’d planned, like his sister before him, or if, like her, he’d changed his mind and settled on something more practical.   
She didn’t think she could choose to stay here, if given the choice to go back, but there was no guarantee that any portal she found would lead back to her world, not to another, not to the wrong time by too large a margin. She could end up in a world populated by giant, intelligent crabs, or in the midst of the French Revolution, or incinerated the moment she set foot on a world covered entirely in volcanos. If she was lucky, she might end up in some time and place where interdimensional travel had been mastered, and she would simply be sent on her way.  
There was no way to know. But with her luck, she’d end up keeping dangerously close quarters with Genghis Khan or wandering an endless alien desert.   
A skittering sound in the dark served quite well to end her brooding. Lucy tensed, and Kili gripped her arm in reassurance. “I kicked a stone,” he explained, and felt her muscles relax only marginally. “Alright?”  
Lucy forced her eyes to stop combing the darkness for a threat, nodded, turned her attention again to the task at hand.  
They found nothing. Not that day, or in the days that followed, until finally Gandalf’s mysterious other obligations called him away once more. The next morning, Kili awoke to find Lucy already awake, but lying perfectly still against him. Her eyes were fixed on the far wall of their cramped room, her breathing so slow and even that he could hardly feel it.  
“Good morning,” he said, and kissed her ear. “Shall we away to the caverns after breakfast?” He was sure to keep his tone light, casual, unassuming, with no hope or dread weighing the words.  
Lucy slowly shifted, tilted her head back to look at him, and he noticed again the depth of her stillness. “I don’t think that we shall,” she said ponderously, and the kiss she pressed to his lip seemed almost absent-minded. Kili studied her face, concerned by her manner, and he could see her draw away from her ruminations as she smiled at him.  
At terrible choice could not be made when the choice was not presented. She was making the choice, in way, by discontinuing her search, but what kind of a choice, really? Was she surrendering to fate, or arranging a new fate for herself? If she were more critical of herself, she would say she was giving up, but it didn’t feel that way.  
More than anything else, she was choosing to be happy, although Lucy knew she’d always have one ear to the ground. She wouldn’t be able to help it, any more than she would be able to help thinking of her brother, or occasionally thinking she should have kept searching no matter what.  
She couldn’t help feeling warmth at the worry on Kili’s face, either, and she marveled at his care as she kissed him again, with more purpose. “Breakfast, however, is a must,” she said, and watched his concern recede, for the time being, in favor of a smile.


	6. Honor and Guard

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lucy's good at keeping her fear under wraps, but it sometimes still gets to her, as when thinking too much about the extent of her injury from the BO5A, and how permanent some of the damage may be.  
> Somehow this turned into the engagement story.  
> Rated T.  
> Smut next chapter, I promise.

His first thought, when he heard the sound of ceramic breaking, was that Lucy had somehow fallen, and accordingly, he found himself standing in the pantry doorway within the same breath.  
Kili relaxed almost immediately, seeing that there was, indeed, a large, thoroughly shattered crock on the floor, the cold stew that had presumably filled it slowly spreading over the floor, engulfing the shards of pottery in its wake.  
He tensed again when he saw Lucy, standing on the far side of the mess. Her expression was murderous. “I thought I could manage it,” she explained stiffly.   
“I’ll find rags,” he said quickly. “Hold tight.”  
“I thought I could,” she repeated. “It wasn’t too heavy – it was the size, it was ungainly.”  
Ungainly only to someone who had only one arm to use freely, as Lucy did. Her left was still bound to her chest, just below her breasts, to restrict its movement as her back healed. Not only had ribs and shoulder blade broken – muscles had been severely damaged, several nearly pulped between Lucy’s bones and the mace that had crushed them. The skin had split open from that same force. Whenever she moved her left arm, it drew on the injured tissues. If she didn’t move it often enough – twice a day, under a healer’s supervision – the bones could fuse into a single solid mass. Ribs to shoulder blade. Muscle caught in all the wrong places. Tendons, ligaments, all in disarray that could only be speculated upon.  
Lucy had been a medical student, in another life. She remembered enough to know that she was very badly off.  
And she knew it nearly every second of the day. Whenever she could manage, briefly, to forget, some pain or another was always quick to remind her.  
“I’ll clean it up,” Kili said, the first time he could remember volunteering for such a task. “It’s nothing. That stew was getting old, anyway.”  
“I don’t care about the stew!” It was nearly a shout, which startled him, even though he knew he wasn’t the reason she’d raised her voice – she so rarely raised her voice at all.   
Lucy’s hands were now both in fists, one protruding awkwardly from the tight, hot, itchy, uncomfortable sling that she loathed almost as much as the injury that demanded its use. She focused on breathing evenly, deeply, so that each inhale sent a sharp spike of pain through every fracture in her bones, to stab back at the rising tide of what felt horribly like panic. She had the terrible premonition that it was too late now to keep from crying, but she didn’t want to cry in front of Kili. He didn’t need to see that. She’d already yelled, which was more than bad enough.   
Kili took a step forward, slowly, so Lucy could protest or move away, but she didn’t. Any fool could tell that she wasn’t upset over the mess, but only a fool would say something on the subject of being crippled, possibly for life, without knowing anything on the matter. Kili hesitated to speak for that reason. Pottery crunched under his boots, and stew gummed them to the floor, and as soon as he was close enough, he took Lucy’s hand. That seemed like a safe gesture, small, unintimidating, easy to accept. Sure enough, Lucy’s fist unknotted easily. She didn’t even have to force it. She was embarrassed by how tightly her fingers wound through his, and by the tears still standing in her eyes – she couldn’t even blink them back at this point, knowing they would fall instead if she tried.  
She was rarely embarrassed. She didn’t like it.  
“It’s going to be alright,” Kili said, and it was easy to say, because he believed it.   
Lucy choked on a mirthless laugh, and the first two tears escaped. The constant fear was swelling, growing teeth, pulsing behind her eyes. She was good with fear – it was natural to adapt to any long-term companion, after all, and she had lived with it for years, in its many forms. Only occasionally did something go wrong – some unfortunate combination of moods and events could leave her vulnerable, and her defenses slipped. Maybe once every few months, like that bleak day that she had received Gandalf’s invitation to join the quest. And now.  
“It is,” he insisted, almost cajoling. “You say yourself you heal quickly. Just a few weeks more –”  
“It doesn’t matter how quickly I heal if I heal wrong, Kili,” Lucy interrupted, an dthere was a desperate edge in her voice. “I have no idea what I’ll be left to work with – will I be able to put that arm behind my back or over my head, even? How long will it take to rebuild the muscle? Can it be rebuilt? Or will I always be weak? Helpless? Can I pull a bow? Swing a sword? Throw a star? Punch, even? How quickly will I be able to run? Will I not even be swift enough to flee, anymore? How can I expect – how long should I expect to survive? How –”  
Kili pressed his free hand to the side of her face, his thumb over her lips, and she finally met his gaze. Fear and helplessness warred in hers. “It will be alright,” he repeated. “You saved my life, Lucy. I owe it to you. I will fight for you.”  
She was shaking her head before he finished. “You can’t promise that. I can’t – I can’t depend on someone, on anyone else. No one can rely on others. They don’t –” Lucy forced herself to take a deep breath. Familiar lance of pain from her back. “People don’t understand the promises they make, when they say they can be counted on.”  
Kili stared at her for a moment in the dim light that came through the door from the kitchen. It occurred to him, absurdly, that he couldn’t recall a single instance in his life of misbehavior and tomfoolery that a quest for a midnight snack had gone so horribly awry.   
“I love you,” he said, and was gratified and relieved that she didn’t shake her head again. “You can rely on me. I swear it.” And, thinking swiftly of the sincerest and weightiest token he could offer, he reached for the leather cord around his neck and tugged so the knot popped apart. He pressed the mithril chip into Lucy’s hand, still trailing the leather tie, and she gazed down at it for a moment, stunned. She could hardly see it in the dim room, but she’d seen it on him, and Fili and Thorin, often enough to know it was important. “The royal seal,” he explained. “Given to me within the hour that I was born. Wear it and remember my promise.” Lucy lifted her eyes to his, lips parting in surprise. “You aren’t alone anymore, Lucy. I would honor and guard you until the stone reclaims me, in word and deed, with hammer and axe, if you would only take me at my word.”  
It was the formal proposal of marriage as best he could translate it from Khuzdul, and Lucy could hear the gravity of the words.  
Kili hadn’t translated it on a whim. He’d mulled it over for days, considered asking Ori for some insight, and, ultimately, had decided to keep the matter to himself.   
It was a proposal meant to be made on the Mountainside, in the sunshine. There was a spot they frequented to picnic, when Lucy was beginning to feel claustrophobic from too many days underground, and he’d meant to breach the topic then, when they were sated with good food and fresh air and quite probably sex.  
It didn’t seem as elegant in a cramped, dark larder in the middle of the night, when Lucy was crying and there was stew all over their shoes.  
But her hand still closed over the seal, and she lifted it to pull her icon from around her neck, managing the task quite deftly with one hand. Kili accepted the small gold charm, warm from her skin, feeling his disbelief yield to a deep, swelling sense of awe.   
Lucy felt the same, and she felt as she did whenever some narrow trail or awkward climb forced her to wobble along the edge of a precipice, but now she chose to stand there, to accept the risk. She had a lifetime of experience that said others didn’t understand the commitments they made, but somehow, she believed that Kili understood this. A lifelong offer was not lightly made.  
And she loved him like she’d loved few others, a physical feeling, as if he were a part of herself. She used to watch her brother wash a dish or do his homework and feel so powerfully overwhelmed by love that it made her chest hurt. She had felt the same for her grandparents, just as frequently, and it felt dangerous to feel it for Kili, for someone who was not bound to her by blood, but she felt it all the same.  
“I love you,” she replied. “I will honor and guard you, until Mary takes me.”   
She kissed him as an act of communion, still standing in the mess of stew and broken crockery, and he kissed her back.


	7. A Treasure Trove

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Obligatory treasure-pile sex! Which is also fluffy!  
> Rated E for graphic descriptions of penetrative intercourse, with an injured character.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pardon the title. I've been very overworked lately (thus very long since last post, sorry), and apparently that means all I can come up with are bad puns in the titular department. Get it? 'Cuz Kili refers to Lucy's lady zone as a trove? See what I did there?  
> I'm sleep-deprived.  
> But surely we're all allowed a campy title here and there.

It was boring, under the Mountain, once the shock and horror had worn off enough to make room for boredom. Dwalin focused on rebuilding his injured leg, Fili working with him to do the same with his arm, though neither could expect a full recovery. Lucy joined them, sometimes, but she found it difficult enough to cope with the idea that she was quite probably permanently crippled; she didn’t need to keep company with friends in the same boat. Ori had his books. Nori waded through the treasure, muttering about none of it being any fun if he couldn’t steal. Bombur read old recipes that had been left behind and forgotten. Oin and Gloin worked on clearing out an infirmary for use when the inevitable construction accidents rolled in.  
Lucy and Kili helped others with their projects, lacking one of their own, and more often than not it ended in Lucy working herself harder than Kili thought she should, a minor argument on that matter, and the healer from Dale scolding whoever was nearest to keep a better eye on his patient.  
It was boring, and things were getting less gloomy, which meant that before long, Kili asked his betrothed, “Is it too soon to be thinking about pranks?”  
And Lucy replied, “Oh, thank god, I was afraid to say it first.”  
At that exact moment, Thorin’s voice rang out. “Kili!”  
They both turned to watch him stride towards them, trying not to look guilty. Lucy edged slightly behind her betrothed, knowing that it was a nonsensical thing to do, as she was several inches taller. “Uncle?” Kili replied.  
“Your mother will arrive within the week,” Thorin informed him, giving Lucy a look that she interpreted as slightly suspicious. “I suggest that you find her a gift.”  
“Where’s Fili?” Kili asked. His brother was better at those sorts of things.  
“He’s assisting Balin today,” Thorin said, raising his eyebrows. “You, however, lack a discernible task.”  
“I’ll find something for Mother,” Kili said quickly, relieved when Thorin nodded and continued on his way. “Help me,” he said to Lucy.  
“I don’t know what else I’d do,” she replied. “No one else wants me to help with anything.”  
“You’re hurt,” Kili reminded her.  
“Healing,” she reminded him in turn, a reflex by now. “So what did Thorin mean by a gift? Do we just . . . pick something out of a treasure pile?”  
“I can’t imagine he wants me to make anything,” Kili mused. “I’m terrible in the forge. Let’s go find a pile.”  
Finding a pile was easy to do, of course – the treasure still lay in huge drifts and dunes like a golden desert. “Has anyone been talking about moving this?” Lucy asked as she clambered up a slope, balance thrown by the arm bound to her side.  
“Not that I’ve heard,” Kili said, and picked up a necklace that turned out to have emeralds. He discarded it. His mother didn’t care for green. Too Elf-like. “I can’t imagine that it will be left here, though.”  
“Well, it’s not practical,” Lucy pointed out, moving away from him. “I can’t imagine that anything in this amount ever is, besides earth, water, or air. Though I’m hard-put to imagine what could be done with it to fix that.” Besides disseminating the wealth across the land, of course.  
“Shelves,” Kili suggested.  
There was a sudden clinking, rushing sound, and a whoop from Lucy. It sounded happy, but Kili ran anyway, feet sending up sprays of coins. He found her lying on her good side amid the gold, laughing. “Landslide,” she explained, grinning.  
“Lucky you landed on your right,” Kili said, offering an arm for her to draw herself up. It made her marginally less uncomfortable than if he drew her up himself. To his surprise, however, she grasped his wrist only to drag him down. He fell in a ringing clatter of gold, coins spilling over his legs and down the back of his tunic. The cold touch of metal made him yelp.  
Lucy laughed at his surprise, making an attempt to splash gold his way that sent up only a few coins – despite the appearance of a sea, many small pieces of a dense solid did not amount to a liquid. Ignoring the jolt the failed blow sent up her wrist, Lucy turned and scrambled away before Kili could retaliate.  
“Hey!” Kili recovered enough to make a grab for her ankle, which failed only because he jerked back at the last moment, afraid to send her tumbling onto her injured side.  
Apparently sharing no such compunctions, his betrothed turned around to stick her tongue out at him before continuing her dogged progress across the golden hillside. Kili followed, surprised that Lucy could move even at her slow speed when the ground shifted and slid underfoot and she had only one arm to work with for balancing and climbing. As it was, though, he managed to gain ground, and this time he caught ahold of her around the waist, securely, and turned as they fell so he landed first. Lucy squirmed, laughing; the splinters of pain from her back were just mild enough to ignore, and she could feel Kili’s chest and belly jump under her from his laughter, and then with his shout of surprise as the gold underneath them gave way from all their movement.  
They went sliding down the slope rather slowly, gaining a little speed before they came to a slow stop, still laughing, gold trickling down around them. Lucy fished a small coin out of her sling and bounced it off Kili’s nose, grinning at the face he made.  
“That could have been bad,” he remarked, not really worried.  
“I agree. This time we’ll need a sled.” Lucy clambered out of Kili’s lap somewhat awkwardly, looking around.  
“I don’t believe there are any,” Kili said, although who was to say what bizarre objects the treasure included. His interest was piqued, however, by the suggestion, and he fell in behind Lucy as she began hiking back up the slope, so he could catch or at least slow her if she fell.  
“I meant something to use as a sled.” Lucy grasped the smooth, flat edge of something half-buried in a drift and dragged forth a large, shallowly curved shield. She gave him a meaningful look over it edge.  
“We shouldn’t,” Kili protested, halfheartedly, because he was already imagining skidding madly across the treasure. “You’re –”  
“Don’t say it!” Lucy interrupted, only half-joking. She was tired of being mollycoddled, and tired of grim, gray, tiring days doing nothing of note. “Don’t you dare! I am riding down a mountain of gold on this shield, Kili son of Dis, because it will be great, it is a rare opportunity, and I refuse to have more regrets in this life than I must.” She dropped the shield, held it in place with her foot, and raised one eyebrow at him in a challenge.  
Kili knew he should stop grinning, that he should be responsible, but he wasn’t terribly good at being responsible. Never had been. He’d always been much better at having fun. Larks. Pranks. Capers. Lucy was very responsible, though, and she was the one suggesting that they sled down the treasure heap, so it couldn’t possibly be that disastrous an idea.  
It was short work getting arranged on the shield. It had surely been meant for decoration because it was large enough for the two of them to sit on, if barely, and only once they’d tried two or three different arrangements of their limbs.  
“Ready?” he asked.  
“Born ready,” Lucy replied, though she did wrap her right arm somewhat more tightly around her torso, holding her left arm firmly in place.  
Kili shoved off with as much force as he could manage in a cramped sitting position, and they jerked forward a bit. It was so anticlimactic that Lucy laughed, and Kili swore good-naturedly as he gave the gold underhand a second shove, then a third, which did the trick.  
They sped along much more quickly than they had when the hill simply gave way beneath them, now sending up a metallic cacophony that sounded like a disjointed orchestra of bells and gongs underscored by the sibilant hiss of displaced coins. Kili could barely hear Lucy’s laughter over the din, and she felt his against her back more than she heard it.  
They made it an impressive distance before they struck a half-submerged gold dome – a bowl or a cauldron of some kind, too large to be a helm. It threw them from their sled at a skewed angle. There followed a confused several moments while they flew, landed, and rolled, catching disorienting glimpses of shining treasure and dark ceiling. Kili was relieved to hear Lucy still giggling when he came to a stop on his belly, a gold coin half-in his mouth.  
Still hugging her bound arm, Lucy inched over to him on her knees. “Hungry?” she asked archly.  
He spat out the coin. “Are you –”  
“I’m fine, Kili.” She was, too – which wasn’t to say that nothing hurt, because she suspected that hitting gold that hard would have hurt even if she were entirely able-bodied. As it was, her entire right side throbbed where it had struck the treasure, bound to be sore in the morning, and probably bruised. Her ribs felt cracked anew, but it had been a month since the Battle; they were well on their way to healed, and could no longer be displaced by a bump, whatever they felt like. She resettled her left arm in its sling, since the tumble had moved it out of its proper position, and offered Kili a grin.  
The physical unpleasantness was well worth the giddy feeling of an adrenaline rush, the childlike joy of temporarily defying gravity, the broad smile on Kili’s face that suggested he felt the same way. Things had been entirely too grim, of late. A moment of fun had been overdue, and anyway, Lucy had a good idea of how to dull some of her aches and pains.  
Kili’s eyebrows shot up as she straddled him. “Here?!”  
“I’d be somewhat surprised if you could honestly tell me you’ve never fantasized about this,” Lucy said, grinding down on him a little and feeling an immediate twitch of interest that drew a responsive jolt from her clit. “The way you all talk about gold . . .”  
He could not honestly say that sex in, on, or around treasure had never crossed his mind, and Kili spared their surroundings only a cursory glance for spectators before he settled his hands on Lucy’s hips. “Your ribs . . . ?”  
“I’d think if anything were going to break them again, it would have been the sledding,” Lucy pointed out, and Kili grinned.  
“Probably,” he agreed, and rolled his hips up into the next slow grind of hers, quickly coming around to the suggestion. They had made love several times since the Battle, but always cautiously, slowly, gently. And there was nothing wrong with any of that – in fact, neither of them had been able to muster the energy or interest for anything else. After the ride down the hill, though, both were feeling more like their old selves, and less like the shell-shocked survivors of a trauma.  
Lucy worked open the ties of Kili’s tunic and shirt and wrested the former off with some help from him, leaving the shirt behind with the courteous thought that cold metal would be unpleasant directly against his skin. “I’ll be glad when the sling comes off,” she said, running her eyes and free hand appreciatively over his stomach and chest. “I’m tired of being on top all the time.”  
Kili laughed. “I don’t mind.”  
“Of course you don’t, lazy,” Lucy teased, mock-exasperated, and smiled when he only laughed again. She circled one of his nipples with her thumb, feeling the slight hitch in his breath and the slow hardening underneath her, as he got to work on the buckles of her left boot. Lucy let him work on it while she got her leggings unlaced and began wrestling them down. It was an awkward maneuver to execute one-handed, and it ended in her toppling forward onto his chest while he reached back to help, laughing.  
“Didn’t your mother ever tell you it’s rude to laugh at cripples?” Lucy cried, mock-outraged, and he laughed again.  
“I’d say you’re more capable with the one arm at your use, khelagh, than most people are with two,” Kili rejoined honestly, glad to hear a jest on the somewhat touchy subject of her wound.  
“Still probably best that I don’t plan to use my hands for this,” Lucy teased, now working on Kili’s laces as he slid one hand up the back of her shirt to touch as much skin as he could with the sling complicating matters. The other he worked down between them, fingers first rubbing small circles into the inside of Lucy’s thigh, then carding through the hair to find and part her folds. He skimmed around her gem, teasing, not quite touching, until his fingers were slick and Lucy was breathless, gasping shallowly for the sake of quiet, biting her lower lip so it was flushed and swollen and wet. Kili sat up to kiss her, losing himself quickly to the familiar heat of her mouth, and her hand knotted into his hair to keep him close as her hips stuttered against his hand. Lucy whimpered against his lips when he drew that hand away, but it was only to guide the head of his cock home. She bit his lower lip impatiently when he missed, unaided as he was by either Lucy herself or a line of sight, and he nipped back – her lip, the line of her jaw, the quivering skin over the pulse point at her throat.  
Kili broke the unspoken moratorium on noise when he finally sheathed himself in her. “Fuck,” he gasped, because it was a marvel every time, how fucking good it felt, and he didn’t think it was possible to grow used to the feeling. He desperately hoped not, even if it did mean that he had to still himself a moment every time he entered her to keep from spilling himself immediately.  
“That’s the idea,” Lucy agreed, too breathless to laugh, and he hardly heard the parry through the sensation of her trove gripping him so tightly and with so much heat that he was hardly aware of anything else. Taking advantage of his stillness, Lucy shifted more of her weight onto her knees, off of his lap, so she could lift off just a bit and rock down at will. Kili buried his groan into her shoulder, and she bit her lip again, focusing on the tilt of her hips so he pressed right . . . there. It wasn’t the best position for it, but she could ride him into her sweet spot if she tried, and she did, Kili managing to get his legs under himself so he could assist, thrusting up as she came down, his hands finding their way to her ass to grip and knead, kissing and biting her lips, her ear, her throat, her slender, solid collarbone, although the last was frustrating for the fabric keeping her skin from his tongue.  
Lucy arched against him, pressing against his chest to feel some kind of friction on her nipples, searching for the last bit she needed. “Close?” Kili guessed, and she had hardly nodded before he ground his knuckles against the very base of her spine, between the dimples just above her ass.  
The sweetly painful pressure ricocheted forward just as the head of his cock rubbed up against her in just the right way, and Lucy stifled a shout into the side of his neck as she came. At the feeling of her tight, slick walls rippling around him, Kili bit down on a sound of his own, his eyes opening of their own accord. He saw the wash of gold over Lucy’s shoulder and remembered quite suddenly where they were – surrounded by a dragon’s hoard, by more gold than could be fathomed, and he came so hard he saw stars, his fingers digging in hard enough to leave bruises they would only notice later.  
Lucy rocked her hips obligingly to help Kili through, though she already felt agreeably drowsy, but wiggled down when he tried to pull out. “Not yet,” she mumbled. She liked feeling full of him, and if she ever had one tiny, passing whim of a wish regarding their sex life, it was that he didn’t become quite so oversensitive after coming, so she could keep him a bit longer.  
Kili gauged his sensitivity and remained still. “Soon, though,” he said, and kissed Lucy’s cheek.  
“Soon,” Lucy agreed, returning the peck reflexively. “Then bed, for a nap. Then we bundle all this up.”  
“Bundle up all of what?” Kili queried, puzzled.  
“This.” Lucy gestured vaguely to the treasure around them with her chin, disinclined to remove her hand from Kili’s hair. “We can’t let other people take anything currently underneath us for their shares.”  
Kili looked down, and then laughed so heartily that he dislodged his cock. Lucy rolled onto her good side, grinning despite herself. It was hard not to laugh when Kili did, though. “Im-imagine!” he hooted, now on his back and rocking from side to side in merriment. “Can you imagine – B-Balin, or Dori! Bilbo!”  
Lucy broke down and laughed, immediately feeling a strong ache from her back, but the more she tried not to imagine Dori’s face, should he learn of this entire debacle, the harder she laughed, until the tears that slipped from her eyes were both mirth and pain and she was pounding on Kili’s thigh to get him to stop proposing people they should give presents to in the near future.  
“We could, you know,” he pointed out, just when the last of Lucy’s chuckles were petering out. “We needn’t even clean the stuff first, it’s not as though we got anything on it.”  
And they both began laughing again, sprawled prone across the golden hillside half-dressed, like lunatics.


	8. Thorin's Blessing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some insight into Thorin's much-beleaguered mind.  
> Largely so that no one thinks the lack of gold sickness or miraculously allowed-to-happen engagement are entirely absurd. Also because I do like Thorin, even if Lucy doesn't.  
> Rated G, I think. Angsty and brooding, but not disturbing or graphic.

Erebor once again bustled with Dwarves. Not as many as it would, soon, when the Dwarves of the Blue Mountains returned, but many of Dain’s number had stayed behind to seek work, and there was much of it to be done before anyone else arrived. And, of course, much treasure to offer in payment.  
Erebor bustled with Dwarves, and one stray Human. Thorin’s eyes followed the distinctive sound of her laughter when it caught his ear, and he looked down to catch a glimpse of her running past several stories below him, one hand in Kili’s and the other still strapped to her chest. Fili was quick on their heels, bellowing like a bull. He was unable to keep up, unused to running with one arm bound to his chest, and though Lucy was in similar straits she had the advantage of longer legs. It was unclear to the observer whether chase had been given for cause of insult, offense over some prank, or petty theft, although all were possible.  
It might have looked cruel, initially, but Thorin did note that it was more exercise than the healers had been able to get out of Fili all week.  
The trio winked out of sight down a hallway, and he sighed as the merry sound of Lucy and Kili’s laughter faded.  
Something had to be done about the pair of them.  
He didn’t know what, but something.

“Nice to hear the laughter of young folk in these halls, again,” Balin remarked cheerfully, his hands in his belt. Thorin startled just slightly; he’d forgotten his cousin was there. Someone with lesser balance might have gone over the edge of the unrailed walkway, and he wondered how Lucy managed not to fall. There was a terrible thought – her bones were made of weaker stuff than a Dwarf’s.  
“Very nice,” Thorin agreed absently, still distracted thinking of the problems Lucy posed. They were myriad.  
“Be a pity to miss that sound again, hmm?” Balin fixed him with a pointed look, one Thorin returned with a scowl. Balin’s avoidance of the word ‘Dwarves’ did not escape his notice. Nor did it escape his mind, busy though it was, that both sons of Fundin were only growing fonder of Lucy now that the Quest was over. It was a trend shared by nearly every member of his Company, and it was not one that made the decisions ahead of him any easier to make.

 

Lucy was not optimistic. Thorin had disliked her from the start, and it had been mutual. He seemed to have regained his usual manner, after the Battle, and there was no sign of the gold sickness returning (she couldn’t imagine how or why, but no one wanted to question it), but even Thorin’s usual manner was not particularly forgiving, or particularly open-minded.  
She was decidedly pessimistic when they finally caught him alone – Thorin was rarely alone, bordering on never alone, but she had been the one to insist that they find him when he was. It would be a taxing enough conversation without asking that he redirect his attention from some other, more important task.  
But when she and Kili finally cornered him, he was gazing up at the smashed casing that used to hold the Arkenstone above the throne. He seemed to be brooding. Kingly brooding was not conducive to indulging the deranged requests of the young.  
“Uncle,” Kili called, before Lucy could suggest they try another time, and if the king was surprised to see them when he turned, he didn’t show it. The same regal bearing, the same cool gaze as always, revealing nothing even as he beckoned them forward. They went, Lucy gripping Kili’s hand much too tightly.  
“I see you still wear my nephew’s braid,” Thorin observed as they approached, his eyes roving over Lucy’s head and following the braid to where it fell over her shoulder. “I had hoped . . .”  
He fell silent, and Lucy resisted the urge to give Kili an I told you so look.  
“Lucy and I have given the matter much thought and discussion,” Kili said firmly, standing straight, “and we consider ourselves to be betrothed. We have come to ask for your approval.”  
Thorin didn’t hide his cringe. He rubbed his eyes, sighing. It had already been a long day, fraught with bad news from the restoration crews – some past action by Smaug had rendered most of the residential areas in the East wildly unstable.  
Thorin’s reply surprised them both. “Have you thought it through?” he asked, lifting his gaze. He doubted that they had. They were young and in love and that tended to make other considerations seem unimportant.  
“Yes,” Kili said promptly. Of course.  
“Yes,” Lucy replied steadily, meeting Thorin’s tired eyes, and he remembered that she, at least, was sensible. Headstrong and odd and mischievous and Human, but sensible.  
Have you noticed the looks directed towards that braid?  
Have you heard what people are saying?  
Have you considered that it may grow worse over years, and not better?  
Have you thought about what you will tell your mothers?  
Have you considered how few years you may have together?  
Have you considered the difficulty of bearing children?  
There were other factors to consider, on his end of things, tradition and propriety and the preservation of the bloodline, but he knew, as any other Dwarf knew, that his kind only loved once. He could not destroy his nephew’s happiness for the sake of tradition, propriety, or even the royal bloodline.  
And he could not cast out someone who had done so well by his people simply because she was not one of them. It was a poor way to repay her service. If he were being entirely honest with himself – which he forced himself to be, these days – he also knew that he felt guilt regarding the mysterious Miss Bell. She had suffered immensely for his people, voluntarily. Even had much of it not been for his nephew, his own blood, he would have owed Lucy a weighty debt. He was king. The troubles of his people were his troubles. Their debts, of blood and gratitude, were his.  
Even if this marriage would throw all of Dwarf-kind into an uproar. Dain would have an apoplexy.  
Thorin sighed again, imagining the chaos to come. “If you wish this, I will not stop you,” he told the young couple. “You do not have my approval, but do you have my blessing.”  
Kili grinned, always easily pleased, but Lucy blinked several times in obvious surprise. “Your back has borne the brunt of too many of my mistakes,” Thorin informed her heavily, his meaning figurative as well as literal. “I have done you too many disservices. I will not question or challenge your choices.”  
And she only looked more startled, so Thorin turned away, gazing up again at the ruined housing for the Arkenstone. He didn’t want it replaced, he wanted it removed, buried in the deepest reaches of the treasury – but he knew that he could not grant himself that quarter. The fitting would be replaced, the stone set once more to sit above the throne, so that it would forever hang over his head, reminding him of the weight of his mistakes, of the mistakes of his forefathers.  
Those mistakes would not be made again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two chapters in one day?! Yes, because I'm sorry it took so long. And also this one was already written.


	9. Princess Dis

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lucy and Dis meet. Rated T. Happens sometime after BO5A, but before Lucy departs for the Shire.
> 
> So, so sorry it's been forever since I posted, but I moved two thousand miles last week and have no internet in my new digs. Finally found a cafe with wifi, though! Hope the server admin doesn't investigate the usage of private browsing. X[]

Lucy smoothed her hand down the bodice of her dress, trying to coerce it into falling correctly, but it had been bought secondhand in Laketown, and hastily refitted. At least the color was good on her, deep plum purple. And her hair looked incredible – the first time she’d seen Kili’s handiwork in a mirror, she’d been unable to believe it. With the addition of pearls strands to the braids (which she had not agreed to before the fact), she almost looked royal, herself. She certainly looked good enough to meet royalty. And maybe she looked good enough to meet Kili’s mother.   
“Relax,” he advised, rubbing his runestone between his hands. It betrayed his own nerves, but Lucy was too distracted to notice.   
“Fili said she’s as formidable as your uncle, with none of his cheer,” she reminded him severely.   
“Fili was just trying to scare you,” Kili said dismissively, although the description was fairly accurate. Fili called Lucy ‘sister’ now, and treated her accordingly; it was hard to say if teasing or a genuine desire to forewarn had motivated the comment.  
The door opened, and they both rose. “Princess Dis,” the servant at the door declared, and the princess herself swept into view. She had the same bearing as her brother, proud and regal, and nearly as impressive a beard. Her dress was as simple as Lucy’s, to the human’s relief. The royal family had lived as anyone else had in Ered Luin, and Dis had set out for Erebor the moment tidings of its reclamation had reached her, with no pause to do anything but supply the journey with the money Thorin had sent with his missive.  
“Milday,” Lucy said, curtsying beautifully, without a wobble, even one-handed. Her left arm was still bound to her chest to keep her from moving it, as the muscle and bone of her back healed on that side.   
Kili knew the cost of that curtsy, had watched her practice with Balin for hours, while he and Fili offered encouragements and teasing criticisms until the older dwarf banished them from the room, ordering them to go find a good solid wall and knock their heads against it.   
“Lucy Bell,” Dis returned, somewhat more coolly than she usually spoke. “Tell me, however did you manage to seduce my youngest son?”  
Kili promptly choked on his own spit. His mother gave him a disparaging look while Lucy ground her good elbow into his ribs. “Milady?” she asked, unnerved, hoping Dis would move on to another subject if Lucy just ignored the question.  
“You can’t possibly ask me to believe that he seduced you,” Dis went on, pointedly shifting her gaze to Lucy as Kili finally cease his sputtering, red-faced. “I know my son.”   
Lucy’s chin rose a little as she recovered. She hadn’t expected to be tested quite this blatantly, but she had expected some kind of test, and she intended to pass. “It was not so much a seduction by either party, milady, as it was that we fell into bed laughing, with all due respect and my apologies for any offense I cause with my candor.”  
Kili straightened a little, proud, and relieved to see the change in his mother’s gaze, the glimmer of respect there. “Honest,” she remarked.  
“When I can afford to be,” Lucy agreed, inclining her head to acknowledge the compliment.  
“Let us sit,” Dis suggested, and they did so, Lucy managing to get her skirt out from under herself and arrayed properly with just the one hand. That had taken practice, too, although if Kili recalled correctly, the last attempt had ended with her flinging a shoe at his head for laughing.  
For a few precious minutes, the conversation went smoothly. Kili stayed out of it when he could, all too happy to let Lucy deftly manage the majority of his mother’s attention, although he knew better than to think he evaded it entirely. How Lucy turned aside veiled insults, sidelong accusations, and probing questions so fluidly, he did not know, but he’d have to tell Fili so they could both make a study of it. They’d lived with their mother their entire lives and couldn’t maneuver under fire half as well as Lucy, although if he was honest with himself, he had to acknowledge that Fili was slightly better. He had tact and foresight, as befitted an heir. Kili had charm and dumb luck.  
Lucy’s first stumble came when Dis finally addressed the matter of her braids, coming in at an oblique angle. “Your hair is quite lovely,” the princess praised, and Lucy brightened just slightly, knowing that it probably wasn’t an honest compliment, but too proud of wearing Kili’s work to entirely close herself off from the praise. Kili hid a wince, guessing what was next.  
“Kili did it,” she said, squeezing his hand where it was resting on her knee. “He’s very good with his hands.”  
“So was his father,” Dis remarked, and Kili almost choked again because there was a double entendre there that he didn’t want to think about, ever, and also because no one mentioned his father – even Dis could only get away with the indiscretion because only an outsider and her son bore witness to it. It was a comment designed to derail him while leaving Lucy slightly unseated. She glanced at him sidelong, her questioning look asking, Did I hear that wrong? “Do you know the meaning of the braids you wear today?”  
“Ah, no,” Lucy said, dragging her attention back to Dis. “Not particularly. He does different ones every day, and I never know . . . I can’t remember which ones are which. No one’s taught me yet.”  
The ‘yet’ was deliberate, and Dis’ brow arched almost imperceptibly. “Most of your braids today are for luck,” she informed Lucy. Several, childishly, all but shouted, ‘MINE!’ although what else she had expected from her youngest, Dis did not know. “The one below your right ear is the braid worn exclusively by the line of Durin, in the location traditionally reserved for the marriage braid. Kili, therefore, has made his intentions with you quite clear, while I find myself wondering if you are even aware of them, much less if you reciprocate.”  
He’d meant the braids to be a fortification, an extra defense, not a point for attack, but Kili had never had the daunting political skill of nearly everyone else in the family. Dwalin was the other exception, although, since Kili wasn’t a giant or a renowned warrior, he probably should work on the talent of manipulation. An easy smile did wonders, but it could only get him so far.  
“We’ve discussed the matter,” Lucy replied evenly, although her grip on Kili’s hand was steadily tightening. He knew how deep the pain of loneliness went for her, how much she feared its return, and how much she feared commitment, counterintuitively, because a broken commitment was worse than none. Or, rather, he knew the depth of it as best he could without being plagued by any of those troubles, himself. “We consider ourselves betrothed, and we will declare the engagement formally at the end of the year, if our feelings remain unchanged.”  
“Why the delay?” Dis asked lightly.  
Because I’m afraid your son might not love me as much as he thinks he does, as much as I love him. “We are both aware of our youth,” Lucy said smoothly. “We are not, however, foolish.”  
Dis nodded sagely to gain a moment to change tactics, probably searching for another weakness, but Kili was no longer sure that she could find one. Lucy was a veritable rock when left to her own devices, and after enlisting the help of virtually every member of the Company to prepare for this meeting, she was granite.   
“I am told that you were wounded in protection of my sons,” Dis said, eyes falling to the sling.  
“Yes.”  
“I am also told that the healers are not sure what affect the wound may have on your arm, even once it is healed.”  
“They are not,” Lucy confirmed. Kili could feel how still she was beside him. She hated being injured almost as much as she hated having her injury brought to the attention of others. She’d tried several times to go without the sling, for that very reason, but Oin had threatened to stitch it to her skin if she wouldn’t wear it of her own volition.  
“It may turn out to have been quite the sacrifice,” Dis observed.  
“A worthy sacrifice, gladly given,” Lucy said, glancing down to see her and Kili’s interlocked fingers. Both sets of knuckling were whitening from the strength of her grip; she loosened it. “One that I would make again, even knowing the affect it has had just so far.”   
“Serious words,” Dis remarked, and Kili had no idea what she was thinking as she scrutinized Lucy’s face.  
Lucy returned the gaze evenly, and Kili could almost feel her resolve harden. “I do not have a place in this world, Princess,” she stated. It did not sound like an admission. “I am without kin, gainful work, wealth, or even good repute. I am alone. Your suspicions regarding me are all entirely well-founded, and I do not begrudge you any of them.  
“Nonetheless, I hope you will set them aside, because I do love your son, and he is the only one who loves me. I would lay down my life for him rather than live without him.”  
The room was painfully silent for several moments. Kili wished that his mother wasn’t there, that she would have the compassion to leave them alone, and quickly, because Lucy had confessed love and loneliness, but never so openly, never so eloquently, and he could feel his heart breaking a little at the same time that it swelled, surely the same as hers did. It was an achingly raw admission, and he wanted to wrap himself around her and make every assurance he could, and assure himself, too, that Lucy was real and whole and healing, because sometimes he still couldn’t quite believe it.  
For a very long moment, his mother and his betrothed gazed at each other. He couldn’t read their expressions for any hint of either’s thoughts, although he recognized the barely-there funny tilt to Lucy’s mouth that meant that, if she were a different person, she’d have shed a tear or two by now.  
“This has been a most enjoyable meeting,” Dis said finally. “I am pleased to finally make your acquaintance, and I look forward to furthering it, but I have another engagement. Perhaps you would join us for dinner?”  
“I would be honored,” Lucy replied, and Dis rose and left, pausing only to give Kili’s shoulder a firm squeeze that he knew well. Approval.   
“Fili was wrong,” Lucy said, the moment the door was closed. “She’s worse than Thorin, Kee! I’m not even sure if I was invited to eat dinner or be eaten!”  
He laughed, taking her face in his hands to kiss her eyes, her nose, her cheeks and ears and whatever else his lips landed on. “She likes you,” he replied, and Lucy was laughing harder, a little unhinged by the entire encounter.  
“What is she like when she doesn’t like someone?” she demanded, and Kili told her the story of his first sweetheart to keep her laughing. An older dwarf, when Kili was too young for such things – he could see that now – and how he had ended up fleeing a family dinner when Dis was midsentence, not to be heard from for a week until word came from the far end of town that the dwarf had taken up work there, safely away from any fire-breathing princesses. Kili made sure to play it all up until Lucy was helpless with laughter, the troublesome idea of dinner banished from both of their minds.


	10. Dinner

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Inescapable in-law awkwardness. Rated T for past character injury, I suppose. Occurs shortly before Lucy heads back to the Shire.

It promised to be an awkward evening. Lucy’s lover. His brother. His uncle, who had only recently begun to tolerate her presence with good grace, and infrequently at that. His mother, who seemed to be hell-bent on sniffing out some weakness or character flaw. His mother and uncle’s cousins. Lucy could only assume that the last two were invited in a stopgap attempt to defray the inevitable tension of the gathering.  
If so, it was not a successful attempt. The room fell silent once everyone was seated and eating.  
Kili shot his brother a pleading glance behind Lucy’s back, and Fili cleared his throat. “Did you make the stew, Mother?”  
Dis nodded. “I did,” she acknowledged. There were a few servants in the employ of the royal family now, selected by Balin, but Dis had grown accustomed to cooking over the years in Ered Luin, and took a sensible kind of pride in feeding her family.  
“Lucy cooks,” Fili supplied. She’d relieved Bombur of cooking duty on the road, from time to time, and he vaguely recalled her making some comment on the matter in Bag End.  
“I do not suspect either of us will have much need for the skill, anymore,” Dis remarked, sipping her wine. It could have been a dismissal, but she offered Lucy a considering look. “You do not know Dwarvish cooking, I assume. Perhaps we should trade recipes.”  
“I would be glad for the opportunity,” Lucy said, which was true. An opportunity to bond with her mother-in-law was no small thing.  
“Did you learn from your mother?” Dis inquired.  
“My grandmother,” Lucy replied. She’d learned the basics through trial and error, standing on a stepstool to reach the stove, making things from mixes that come in a box. Her mother had been physically and mentally ill for as long as she could remember; Lucy had schooled herself to household chores to compensate. She had learned to cook well, and for the enjoyment of it, at her grandmother’s elbow once her mother was dead.  
“May I ask after your family?” Dis asked, setting down her glass.  
Kili shook his head at his mother, quickly, but she only frowned at him. Lucy noticed and put a reassuring hand on his knee under the table even as she struggled to swallow the bite of food in her mouth. Dwalin and Balin both frowned across the table at the young couple, trying to discern what was wrong. Thorin made a close inspection of his fork.  
“My grandfather was born to farmers,” Lucy replied. “They lost their land, though, when he was around my age, and he moved into the city for work as a laborer on the docks. My grandmother was a seamstress like her mother before her, and she married my grandfather not long after they met. Their marriage was blessed with only one child, my mother. They became estranged from her, and my brother and myself by extension, when I was seven years old. Our mother died when I was sixteen, so they took us in and raised us the rest of the way.” Lucy had hardly needed it. She’d been stone-cold and hardened at sixteen, decent parenting arriving too late on the scene to do her much good. Peter had thrived under it, though, like a seedling in sunshine. It had been months before she regarded their new caretakers without wariness, before she so much as smiled at them, before she stopped coming and going at odd hours through the windows. Peter had smiled at them after only days, had taken to intramural soccer and chess club like a child who had never known hardship.  
Lucy had always been the difficult one. It didn’t seem that things would be any different with her in-laws.  
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Dis said, sincerely, seconded by uncomfortable murmurs of agreement from around the table. “What of your father?”  
To the surprise of them all, Lucy smiled. “I have no father,” she said. “I sprang from my mother’s brow fully formed. Like your own sons.”  
And Kili laughed aloud. “I’d half-forgotten that,” he chuckled. “And the she-Elf who braided your hair.”  
Dis’ eyebrows rose in sync with Thorin’s. Balin chuckled. “I’d forgotten that, myself,” he agreed. “Tell me, lass, did ye manage to let the Elf down easy?”  
Lucy gave him a dour look. “She was somewhat disappointed,” she said dryly, “but I’m sure she’s now fully recovered,” and by then Fili was snickering into his potatoes and Dwalin was snorting into his beer.  
“I fail to see the connection between a paucity of fathers and your betrothed courting a she-Elf,” Dis commented dryly, and Dwalin choked on his drink.  
“We took respite in Imladris, cousin, if ye recall,” Balin explained. “I’d imagine the conversation about fathers took place there, if it reminded Kili of the . . . misunderstanding.”  
Both mollified by the word ‘misunderstanding’, Dis and Lucy incrementally relaxed.  
“I’d imagine your brother will join us for a visit sometime soon,” Thorin said, surprising them all by speaking. He regarded Lucy curiously. “I did not know you had a brother.”  
“He’s a librarian,” Lucy confirmed. “Last that I knew of him.”  
The silence was painful, forcing her to elaborate.  
“We were separated. There was a . . .” Lucy shook her head slightly. “Orcs were involved.” Semi-true. “I haven’t been able to find him.”  
“You have the money, now, to hire someone else for the job,” Balin suggested. “Rangers, perhaps?”  
Lucy looked a little odd at the suggestion – not, Kili noticed, like the conversation pained her, but more like her throat was contracting around an unwelcome giggle while she tried to keep her face serious. “I know a few Rangers,” she agreed, and he understood suddenly, wanted to laugh. She knew a few Rangers.  
Lucy ignored Kili pinching the muscles just above her knee, where it tickled almost beyond her ability to hide it, biting on her tongue as she ground her heel down onto his toes. The corners of his mouth were quivering with a poorly-swallowed smile. Cheeky bastard. She wished his bots weren’t so thick.  
Fili gave them both an annoyed look for jostling the bench shared by the three of them. “You know quite a number of people,” he observed casually. “How did you befriend the Skinchanger, again?”  
Kili leaned around his betrothed to give his brother a dark look, which was returned with a bright and guileless smile.  
Dis was frowning. “Skinchanger?”  
“He turned the tide of battle in our favor,” Dwalin said quickly. “A good Man – erm, person.”  
“He saved my life at least twice now, by my count,” Lucy added, and saw Dis’ gaze drop to her left hand. She slid it off the table and into her lap by reflex, before she could stop herself.  
“An odd injury, that,” Dis observed. “May I ask?”  
I’d prefer that you didn’t. “Orcs have unusual appetites,” Lucy said, choosing the words carefully, trying to phrase the answer in the manner least offensive to the more sensitive appetites of her dinner companions. There were still cringes all around. Kili gripped her hand on his knee, rubbing his thumb over the crest of her knuckles, and she lifted one shoulder in a hint of a shrug, catching his eye.  
“You must be very well-travelled,” Dis said. It was almost a compliment.  
“I am that,” Lucy agreed, but she couldn’t think of anything else to say that was both relevant and appropriate. Years of guarding her tongue to the point of paranoia occasionally made conversation difficult. Everyday matters were easy – personal discussion was almost impossible, especially if she tried to remain close to the truth.  
The lull in the conversation was uncomfortable. Lucy prodded her potatoes.  
“Oin says I can take my sling off this week,” Fili volunteered. “What of yours, Lucy?”  
“Same,” Lucy said, cheering a little at the reminder. “Any day now.”  
“That’s very fine news,” Thorin said, as Dis gripped Fili’s shoulder and Dwalin and Balin offered their congratulations. “It certainly calls for better drink than this.” He gestured to one of the servants, who nodded and departed.  
Dwalin began to speak of exercises to strength the arms, and Lucy was grateful that someone else had decided to attract most of the attention, especially when the better grade of ale arrived (not that she could tell the difference) and Dwalin’s talk distracted Dis from noticing that Lucy kept to drinking water. Balin took issue with some detail of an anecdote Dwalin shared about the past injury of a mutual friend, and for a while they debated good-naturedly, trading verbal parries in a manner that spoke of long familiarity, and which made the others laugh. Even Dis laughed, and it occurred to Lucy that in a few months or years, she might make Dis laugh, too, and feel at ease at this table, with these people, as if they really were her own.  
She hadn’t realized that that was a possibility; she had only thought of the immediate trouble of mistrust and unfamiliarity. Cheered considerably by the idea that this was temporary, she offered Dis a cautious smile when their gazes happened to meet, and to her surprise, Dis nodded back.  
Kili saw, and gave her hand a squeeze under the table. She smiled at him, too, and took another bite of stew.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not sure why I envision the dwarves eating so much stew, but now I want some.


	11. The Last Secret

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You may or may not recall that in the epilogue of "Home Under the Mountain", I make references that allude to Lucy being pregnant. This is what comes of that.   
> Rated E for miscarriage.

Bilbo did not want to go through Mirkwood. He was staunchly, adamantly against it, in fact, and Lucy was staunchly, adamantly for it. She could feel time trickling through her fingers like gold sand, precious and irretrievable.   
“Why?” Bilbo cried when the argument had delayed them at the wood’s edge for nearly half an hour. Gandalf had long lost patience, interest in the outcome, or any hope of getting either party to back down. “Why would you want to go back into that accursed place?!”  
“Because I would like to be back in Erebor before I give birth!” Lucy finally shouted, and Bilbo’s mouth dropped open like a hatch.  
Gandalf recovered first. “Well, now, Miss Bell,” he said very gravely, tugging his beard. “That’s hardly proper.”  
The look she gave him could have peeled paint, but apparently it had no effect on wizards.  
“You should go back now, then,” Bilbo said, even as he blushed red to the roots of his hair. “I mean, in your – condition –” His eyes fell to her flat abdomen, and then quickly skipped away as his blush deepened.  
“It’s eight weeks at the latest, and I wanted one last trip before I’m practically chained to the Mountain,” Lucy informed him, lifting her chin.   
Bilbo sputtered incoherently, Gandalf speaking over him. “Then through Mirkwood we shall go,” the wizard declared, nudging his horse to walk forward. “For the sake of returning to Erebor in a timely manner.”

 

It was an uneventful trip through the forest, without spiders or elf patrols to hinder them, and Gandalf to keep their minds sharp against enchantments. Not an entirely pleasant trip, since the wood was still dark and gloomy and all-around sinister, but not terrible. Lucy was surprised by the speed of their passage, when hunger, disorientation, and attack were not factors.  
The shortcut was certainly well worth it, when the outcome was that they reached Beorn’s valley sooner. Lucy felt her spirits lift appreciably when she laid eyes on his home, and she nudged her pony into a trot and then a run, swinging out of the saddle to run through the gates. It felt good to be able to run and even spar again without undue pain, after being injured for months on end. Her broken ribs still often protested any particularly acrobatic stunts, and probably always would, but Lucy had close enough to full use of her arm that she considered herself well-off. It didn’t move behind her back, anymore, or very far above her head, but there were worse things. If occasionally some panic still seized her over the matter, she reminded herself that she didn’t have to travel alone anymore. Kili would accompany her anywhere they needed to go.  
Emerging from his hall, Beorn greeted Lucy warmly, happy as always to see her, and seemed only slightly surprised to see Gandalf and Bilbo riding through the gate at their more sedate pace. “We had hoped that we might trouble you for your hospitality,” the wizard said brightly, dismounting. “We are headed West again, to return Bilbo to Hobbiton.”  
“You are welcome here,” Beorn said, and glanced down at Lucy. “I am surprised to see you traveling,” he observed. “When last I saw you, there was a Dwarf sewn to your side.”  
“I’m going back,” Lucy said, rolling her eyes. Kili hadn’t left her bedside much, the first week or two after the Battle, but she wouldn’t have said he was attached to her. “I just wanted to see Bilbo home, listen for any news, take in the autumn in its glory.”  
“The trees will change in a few more weeks,” Beorn agreed, looking towards his orchard. “It will be beautiful, when you return this way. Come inside.”  
And they did, finding the hall unchanged as ever, full of animals and hearty food. Lucy found the old, faded bloodstain on the wood just inside the door, as was her habit, and scuffed at it with the toe of her boot. Bilbo watched from the corner of his eye, bemused. “Where he set me down,” she explained, eyes on the discolored pine boards. “This first time I was here. Won’t come out.”  
“Ah, white vinegar?” Bilbo suggested, fumbling for the right recommendation to get blood out of the floorboards, and Lucy laughed like he’d made a joke,   
“I am surprised that you left your dwarf,” Beorn told Lucy, when it was late and Bilbo and Gandalf were long snoring.  
Lucy smiled at him over the rim of her mug as she sipped her tea. Bundled up on the hearth in a blanket, like always. Beorn had never once tried to keep a wild thing, but seeing her curled up like that often made him wish she would stay of her own volition – safe and sound. “Kili,” she reminded him. “His name is Kili.”  
“You wear his braid.”  
“I do,” Lucy confirmed, setting down the mug.   
“You will stay with him.” Beorn’s voice didn’t betray anything of his feelings on the matter.  
Lucy hesitated. “I would like to,” she admitted. “I’ll try. But I still have a brother, somewhere . . . and I’ve never been good at sitting still. I don’t think I can stay with Kili all the time, but most of the time . . .” She nodded to herself. “Most of the time, I can do.”   
“And what of the child?”  
Lucy’s eyes twitched from the fire to meet his. “What?”  
“Is it his?”  
Lucy shook her head twice, quickly, as if trying to dislodge water from her ears. “DO I want to know how you know?”  
Beorn shrugged. He could smell something different about her, and she’d been surreptitiously adjusting her chestcloth all evening, when she thought she was unnoticed. His wife had done that, in her early months, though he’d forgotten until now.   
“Yes,” Lucy confirmed, sighing. “It’s Kili’s.”  
The idea did not sit entirely well with the skinchanger. “You are hardly more than a child, yourself,” he rumbled.  
“Not with this again,” Lucy muttered, though he hadn’t said a word on the matter in years, and he usually wasn’t shocked into forgetting that Lucy’s capability and maturity belied her appearance. “I am not, I am nearly a third of the way through my years, and that’s if I live to my grandmother’s age and barring any unforeseen circumstances.” Like the effect of a half-dwarf child on a human mother, for instance. She buried the tremor of unease the thought gave her.  
Twenty . . . Beorn counted the years. They tended to get away from him. Twenty-six or -seven? And a third of her life gone already. He felt a sudden pity for her dwarf, knowing that they mated for life.   
“Travel should not affect the child,” Beorn said ponderously, and how he knew that Lucy couldn’t guess. Except that she could, and she had the sudden horrible thought that he may have had children, in another time and place, another life. “You should eat more honey, though.”  
Lucy chuckled. “I suppose so,” she acknowledged, and was rewarded with a smile.  
“Will I see the child?” Beorn asked, suddenly much taken with the idea. He loved children, though he had not seen one in centuries. Roly-poly little creatures underfoot, laughing and learning, tugging his beard, listening to stories . . . snarling bear cubs one moment and giggling bairns the next, although of course Lucy’s wouldn’t be a skinchanger (which was a mild disappointment, because he’d always supposed that she would make a lovely bear).   
“Of course,” Lucy replied, although she hadn’t thought about it, and she wondered if Beorn didn’t care for her a little more than she’d thought, all these years, if she hadn’t been quite as alone as she’d thought. She smiled at him. “Where else would we stay when the Mountain feels too heavy overhead?”

 

The next stop was in Rivendell, where they lingered a second night, because all three of them very much enjoyed the Homely House. Lucy wandered through the Hall of Healing to see a few of her older acquaintances, from the time that she’d lived among them and studied with them, taking care to thank the healer who had taught her the athelas poultice. Without it, she probably wouldn’t have been wearing a certain braid in her hair.  
Seeing the Halls of Healing reminded her of her ‘condition’ as Bilbo insisted on calling it, as if she had a mental disorder or a flu complication, and she realized Rivendell would probably be the best place for having the baby. It seemed counterintuitive, a human mother bearing a half-dwarf child with an elf as a midwife, but she wasn’t entirely sure either a human or a dwarf midwife would have the skill to negotiate what would probably be an unusual birth, even barring complications. She also doubted an elf healer would come to Erebor for the occasion, or be entirely welcome, as the two races did not have much to do with one another.  
Then again, it was probably unlikely that Thorin or Dis or whoever was in charge of such things would let her out of Erebor once the pregnancy was made known, so . . .  
Lucy chewed willowbark for the headache she was giving herself as they rode out of Imladris, once more moving East.

 

It took them several weeks to reach Bree, as it had taken them several weeks to bridge the same distance on the original journey, and though Lucy wanted few things more in the world than to collapse into one of the Prancing Pony’s clean beds and take the a day’s rest, Bilbo was so excited over seeing his home that they only stopped in the inn for a hot breakfast. They parted ways with Gandalf there, as he had other, mysterious business to attend to.  
Keeping to a brisk pace (which Lucy was sure the ponies did not appreciate), they managed to make the Brandywine Bridge by perhaps an hour after sunset. With the promise of Bag End only four or five hours out, they decided to press on instead of asking for lodging in Buckland. (Bilbo also had doubts regarding the hospitality of the nearby homeowners when they saw a Big Person, if a relatively small one.)  
Neither was sure of the time when they finally reached Bag End. It was as welcoming as ever, tended loyally by Bilbo’s friend Hamfast during his absence, if also, they would learn, eyed greedily by the Sacksville-Baggins. It was made even more welcoming by the light rain which had begun as they rode into Hobbiton, and not let up yet. “No mud in the bedrooms!” Bilbo fussed as Lucy her shed her wet things in the entryway. “Oh, we need baths before we can touch anything . . . Get the wet clothes into this basket, please . . .”  
The idea of a bath did not appeal to Lucy, feeling so tired that she didn’t even care about being damp and chilled, so she undid the minimum number of buckles on her boots to wrestle them off, shrugged out of her outer layers, dragged a blanket over the upholstery of an armchair to protect it, and curled up to sleep, too tired to even tease Bilbo for still caring about mud in the house after seeing trolls and a dragon. 

 

It felt like only minutes later that Lucy awoke, and for a moment she didn’t know why. Water was dripping slowly from one of the eaves just outside the window, making an irregular plopping sound, and for a moment she thought that she had just woken when the rain stopped. She looked around, noticing that Bilbo had set a fire in the grate and laid a second blanket over her, and was thinking about moving to a bed when she felt it.  
A cramp. A little one, almost unnoticeable, except that everything was so still and quiet.   
Lucy flattened a hand to her abdomen just below her bellybutton. It was still flat, she had another month before she could expect to start showing.   
It was probably nothing. Occasional cramps were normal, as long as they were mild, and this was hardly noticeable.  
She needed some good, warm tea to send her back to sleep, and when she woke up to sunshine streaming through the parlor curtains, she wouldn’t even remember this strange interlude in the night.   
Tea kettle. Water. Stove. Mug. Lucy leaned back against the counter, feeling another ripple of discomfort. She rubbed at her eyes and felt a yawn swell and rise. They’d gotten up early the past several days, to make good time, tiring her out . . . How far along was she, now? Eleven . . . twelve weeks. Some fatigue was normal . . .   
Another cramp. Lucy lifted the teakettle and poured water into her mug, though it wasn’t really hot enough. What tea? Tea that was good for the baby . . .   
She almost dropped the box of peppermint tea, her hand clenching hard around it so the wooden corners of the box dug into her skin. Bad. Very bad cramp. Not good. Not normal – Lucy screwed her eyes closed, biting down on a shout, not because it hurt that badly, but because she’d almost called out for Kili and he wasn’t there.  
Maybe it would go away. She could still go back to sleep. Maybe it was a nightmare.  
Hoping that things weren’t really happening was usually what killed people. Kili and his leg wound from that orc arrow rose immediately to mind. Denial killed. But people didn’t die from miscarriages – Lucy dredged through what little of her medical knowledge extended to obstetric matters, all of it learned in another life, distant and difficult to recall. Eighty percent of pregnancies that miscarried at thirteen weeks did so completely. The other twenty aborted incompletely, which meant matter remained inside the uterus and required surgical intervention or –   
Surgery. Not an option in this world. Lucy hadn’t missed the luxury of Emergency Rooms in some time, but now she did, and with a vengeance.   
But maybe, maybe it wasn’t, maybe it was just early Braxton-Hicks or something else unlikely but harmless. Lucy fumbled at the laces of her trousers, slid a hand into her smalls, drew away fingertips that shone dark red in the faint light from the fire in the next room and the moonlight through the window.  
“Bilbo!” she yelled, her clean hand grappling behind her for the countertop, because her knees had gone watery.

 

This is happening. You’re miscarrying. This is a miscarriage.  
Lucy pressed her hands against her face, only half-hearing Bilbo run around like a chicken with his head cut off. “A midwife! We need a midwife! Or a healer, what – Bree! Send Old Noakes and then go to Bree!”  
Hamfast was still cutting worried looks at the woman in Bilbo’s parlor when Bilbo pushed him out the door, coins in hand to incentivize anyone reluctant to leave their beds.   
“It’s going to be alright,” Bilbo assured Lucy, none too certainly, returning to her side and winding his small hand into her fist to grip. “Does it hurt very badly?”  
“Not that badly,” Lucy said quietly, keeping one hand over her eyes because she didn’t want to see anything. “Like a normal cycle, almost.”  
“Good, good,” Bilbo said, too flustered already to be further distressed by the mention of female internal workings. “That’s a good sign, isn’t it?”  
Lucy nodded, lifted her hand to wipe at her eyes, stared out the window. She was afraid to say that she wanted Kili, because then she’d really cry, and Bilbo was already taxed to his limits. She squeezed his hand, grateful for it, for his presence, even if it was a poor substitute.

 

The hobbit midwife arrived first, as could be expected, shrugging out of an oilskin cloak still wet from the earlier rain. She made an inspection of Lucy that seemed altogether too brusque to Bilbo, before he fled into the kitchen to allow some degree of privacy.  
“No swelling,” Old Noakes observed. “Not too tender. Good bleeding. Nothing to do but wait.”  
Lucy nodded, tight-lipped.  
“Father?” the midwife asked.  
Lucy nodded, then shook her head. “He’s far East of here.”  
“A handsome Man, I’m sure,” the old hobbit said firmly, meaning to distract, and it worked, her patient’s mouth curving into a weak smile.  
“A very handsome dwarf,” Lucy corrected, gazing up at Bilbo’s ceiling. A very nice ceiling, luckily for her. At some point the midwife had helped her into a guest bedroom, where she could lie on her back for ease of passing . . . material. Not the baby, not anymore, just material.

 

The human midwife arrived many hours later, Bilbo anxiously watching the kitchen clock while Lucy watched the one on the mantelpiece of the guest room. After making her own inspection, the woman concluded that there was not much else to be done but what Old Noakes had said: wait. Giving her name as Audie, she settled down on the bed beside Lucy and stroked her hair, asking about the very pretty and unusual braid under her ear and listening to her talk about a betrothed half a world away, assuring her that the travel had not caused the loss.  
“It’s going to happen again, isn’t it,” Lucy asked sometime around four in the morning.  
“Probably,” Audie conceded. “With a dwarf for the father . . . it may take several tries for anything to stick.”  
Lucy rarely cried, but she folded her arms over her face and did so then. 

 

She awoke shortly after dawn, Old Noakes dozing in an armchair not five feet away, the quiet murmur of Bilbo and the human midwife (she couldn’t remember her name) in the kitchen coming down the hallway, through the open bedroom door.  
Gandalf was perched on the only chair in the house that suited him, puffing his pipe smoke out the cracked window, admiring the day. “Good morning,” he greeted Lucy without turning, and she smiled, just a little.  
“What do you mean by that?” she asked, trying to remember the conversation from months ago, but her heart wasn’t really in it.  
“I mean that I hope your morning will be good,” he replied, turning to offer her a sad smile. “Despite the events prior to it.”  
Lucy’s sigh was ragged, but she didn’t think she would cry again for a while. She felt wrung out like a wet cloth in more ways than one. She wanted to ask Old Noakes if she could get up, but the elderly hobbit was snoring so loudly that she hadn’t stirred at their conversation, and Lucy didn’t want to wake her twice in one day.  
She sat up slowly, her formerly broken bones protesting the change after so long in one position. Her eyes were sandy when she rubbed at them. The cramps were gone, for the moment, but the bleeding would last for days, could last for weeks.  
“Did Kili know?” Gandalf asked quietly.  
“No. Do you think he would have let me go alone if he had?”  
“I suppose not.”  
“And he couldn’t come with me, with Erebor being reconstructed. Thorin wouldn’t have let him. So either I would have had to stay, or he would have left like a thief in the night.” They would have returned to a nightmare of yelling and cursing about honor and responsibility and worrying one’s mother with childish antics and – Lucy sighed again. Even in her head, Thorin really could go on.  
“No one is questioning your decisions.”  
“I am.” Maybe travel didn’t hurt a regular pregnancy, but this hadn’t been regular, and neither would be any that came after it. Lucy didn’t even have any way to determine what had gone awry. Chromosomes, blood types, mutations, incompatible alleles . . . the possibilities were almost infinite. She should have put herself on bedrest the minute she suspected a pregnancy.  
“There will be other children,” Gandalf said firmly. “These things happen.”  
This thing wouldn’t have happened if Lucy had done the sensible thing and started drinking mistletoe tea when she and Kili took up, but she hadn’t thought – she hadn’t really expected it to happen, it didn’t seem possible, and she hadn’t thought to ask anyone. Who could she have asked, about the possibility of such a thing? She should have hedged her bets and drank the tea, and she wouldn’t have gotten pregnant in the first place. Or she could have doubled the dose when she finally realized it had happened, drank it to put an end to it herself, when it was early, when it wouldn’t have hurt, when she hadn’t started wondering what he or she would look like as a baby, a toddler, a child, if he or she would look more like Kili or her . . .   
Not he or she, it, at that point, just an it, and now nothing. Nothing even to bury, had she wanted to.  
And she did want to, but she couldn’t.   
“How did you know to come?” Lucy asked, rubbing her eyes, which felt hot and puffy from the fits of tears the night before – the last probably only an hour or two before.  
“A half-panicked hobbit astride a galloping pony, barreling through a town of humans in the dead of night, banging on doors nearly at random shouting for a human midwife, does tend to generate gossip,” Gandalf explained, tapping the bowl of his pipe against the wall outside the window and repacking it. “I estimated that the number of humans among hobbits requiring a midwife was probably quite low, and here I am.”  
“And here I thought it was going to be something impressive or mysterious,” Lucy scoffed, trying for a teasing tone but falling a little short. “Some wizard you are.”  
Gandalf smiled, lighting the fresh tobacco. “I believe you will be just fine, Miss Bell,” he said, gazing out the window again. “You always are.”

 

The bleeding did last for weeks. For the first week, Lucy was mopey, prone to unexpected fits of crying that she was largely unsuccessful in trying to hide from Bilbo, as even when she was quiet his keen hobbit ears picked up on the sound and tracked it to wherever she had hidden herself – the coat closet, the linen closet, the broom closet. Closets were plentiful and handy in Bag End.  
She left after the first week, even though Bilbo insisted she was welcome to stay, that he didn’t want her out and about in her condition (it seemed to be a catch-all term), and she knew he meant every word, but she was also distressing him, and she didn’t want that.  
She spent the second week and the third riding to Beorn’s hall. The valley was as beautiful as she expected, the trees blazing red and orange like torches. The sight made her think of the songs sung about the fall of Erebor and the destruction of Laketown, and in turn Kili. She missed him so fiercely that it was a physical pain in her chest, but she didn’t want to return too quickly. Not when she was still recovering, and he would have to know why.  
Beorn was gardening when she approached, and stood up to shade his eyes against the sun with a broad hand, already smiling to see her when his gaze fell to her stomach and the smile shifted into a frown, and then into not much of an expression at all. He did not ask how she was, or what had happened. He simply embraced her as soon as she had slid from the saddle, and Lucy was acutely, achingly grateful.  
Even if it did make her cry again. She cried far too easily, of late, all hormones and confused loss, and she didn’t intend to return Erebor until it was done and over with, so Kili would never have to know.   
“What did you name it?” Beorn asked at the end of the fourth week.  
“I didn’t,” Lucy replied, huddling deeper into her blanket.  
“You have to name it,” he replied. “So that you may find it in the afterlife.”  
It had felt like a boy, so Lucy named him John, after her grandfather, just in case Beorn was right, and she felt better having a name to call him by. 

 

She stayed at Beorn’s hall through the winter, just to be sure she would return seeming unscathed. The snowstorms sometimes raged for days, and she and Beorn remained snugly indoors, playing games and exchanging stories, emerging each time to find the world pristinely white, all of the stones and scars of the Earth hidden beneath a new skin. The sun sometimes glanced off of it like daggers to the eyes, beauty so brilliant that it hurt, the bare limbs of trees like gray fingers scraping the pale sky. They drank cider and mulled wine by the hearth, and tended to the animals, and spoke in a language forgotten to any but them. On the clear days, the air was sometimes so cold that Lucy could feel her recently-broken ribs ache when she inhaled, and the snow glittered like diamond and the sky was a clear and perfect blue. On those days, they went walking along the river – Beorn warm in his bear form, hardly sinking through the snow on his broad feet, and Lucy stomping along in self-made snowshoes whose early editions left her floundering in the drifts, thrashing to try and free herself until Beorn came to investigate, his wet nose tickling Lucy’s cheek more often than not, making her laugh as she tugged off her mittens to grip his fur so she could be drawn out of the snow. She half-suspected him of tickling her on purpose.   
She tried not to think too much, and it was easier than she expected, as time passed, to forgive herself. She knew better than most that, as Gandalf put it, sometimes things simply happened. There was no controlling life, or forestalling pain. There was only accepting, learning, and moving onward.   
Spring came early, flowers curling green and bright through the last of the snow, the river running fast and brown with runoff from the mountains. The ground felt spongy underfoot from all the water, like gravity had been partially suspended and at any moment too long a stride could cause flight. Lucy began to itch to move again, feeling a steady drag to the East on her feet, a firm draw on her heart.  
They left with snow still on the ground and in the mountains, Beorn accompanying her through Mirkwood and leaving her at the ferry to Esgaroth. Lucy was amazed by the amount of construction done in her absence, astounded by the feverish hum of city life in Dale, which had still stood nearly-empty when she set out. The front gate to Erebor was fully repaired, standing so tall and grand that she was momentarily discouraged in her approach, wondering if the hidden door high on the Mountainside still stood open.  
But approach she did (largely because she was sure she remembered Thorin making some mention of sealing the door to maintain its secrecy for future contingency), and allowed inside she was. The dwarves on guard were all entirely unfamiliar, and unsmiling, but they had been forewarned of such a young woman months ago, and the braid over her shoulder gave her enough clout to walk in uncontested.   
Lucy wandered, for a little while, marveling at the changes, at how much brighter it was with torches lit and windows repaired and widened, at how much more warmer the very air felt for the low murmur of talk that hummed through the corridors. She didn’t know where to go – surely the rooms where they’d camped before were now put to some other use, and it seemed imprudent to just mosey into the royal quarters, even assuming her betrothal braid was enough to get her that far.  
If she was also worried, in the smallest, darkest corner of her mind, about seeing Kili once again, she refused to acknowledge it.  
Eventually, she worked her way in that direction, planning to simply ask a guard, or someone important-looking, to find Kili for her. Instead she meandered into the receiving hall, still obviously under construction, the casing for the Arkenstone above the throne replaced but gaping empty.  
And standing below it was a small cluster of dwarves, backs turned to the door as they discussed the fitting with workers, but recognizable nonetheless by the set and slope of their shoulders, the fall of their hair. Thorin, Balin, Dis, Fili . . .   
Her heart lurched, too hard and fast to control. “Kili!” The air burst from her lungs in an involuntary shout, half a squeal, if she was honest, and they all turned, and his face brightened the same way she remembered, like it had been four days and not four months, and her answering smile made her cheeks ache.  
Maybe it was wrong, but she would keep one last secret. She’d told all the others, but this last one, she’d keep – she never wanted to take that smile off his face, never wanted him to hurt, and it was enough for one of them to know John’s name. Kili didn’t need to.


	12. Sensible People

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lucy and Kili spend her first two days back in bed. Dis is not pleased. Awkward hilarity ensues. Rated M.

Dis surveyed the room with a frown. Her brother was seated at one end of the table, as usual, Dwalin beside him, Fili across from the old warrior. Balin was absent, which was not unusual, as he kept himself busier even than Thorin, some days, and breakfast was typically an informal affair. Nori was sitting in his place, which was also unsurprising, as he and Dwalin had only grown more attached to one another as the months went by.  
Kili’s chair beside his brother’s stood empty, as did the one which Dis had placed beside it for Lucy, out of good manners more than welcome. She sank into her own seat slowly, frowning at the empty spaces. Now that she was thinking about it, she hadn’t seen either of them since Lucy returned, and what a sight that had been – the pair of them embracing as if they were entirely alone, although the obvious joy written on her youngest son’s face had mollified her considerably. All present had been relieved that Ori returned from his errand to fetch more parchment for record-keeping only after the pair had departed, crestfallen though the youngster had been to miss Lucy’s return.  
“Fili,” Dis said, interrupting his laughter over some joke from Dwalin. “Where is your brother?”   
Her eldest grinned, avoiding her gaze. “If I had to guess – bed.”   
Nori chuckled. “Have you been sleeping better in my room?” he asked, and Fili nodded as he chewed his bacon.  
Dis raised her brows at her cousin’s lover. “Why has Fili been sleeping anywhere but his own room? And where have you been sleeping, if he’s in your room?”  
“I’ve been in Dwalin’s room,” Nori replied brightly, and from the way he jerked, Dis would have guessed that Dwalin had kicked him under the table. She allowed her brows to lift a little higher.  
Fili snickered around a full mouth, obviously much amused, and she homed in on him again. “What is wrong with your room, Fili?”  
“It shares a wall with Kili’s,” he mumbled, avoiding her gaze as he sipped a mug of milk.  
She stared at him. “You cannot be serious,” she said. “He hasn’t come to the table in two days!”  
“I told the kitchen,” Dwalin said dismissively. “They’re jus’ fine.”  
“I was not worried about them eating,” she informed him stiffly.   
“Injury, then?” Nori asked just a little too helpfully, biting into a biscuit. “I’ll grant that they’re young and fit, but how they’d manage –” He choked, and from the way the table shook, Dis surmised that he was being kicked by her son and cousin both, and even, possibly, her brother. Thorin was not particularly fond of Lucy, but he respected her, and they had reached a strange sort of truce that Dis did not entirely understand.  
“This is absurd,” Dis said, standing. “Kili is a grown Dwarf; he will eat breakfast at the table like a sensible person.”  
“Mother,” Fili said quickly, rising. “I don’t think –”  
“That much is evident,” she agreed, striding from the room, and bets were quickly placed as everyone else got up to follow her.  
They encountered Balin on the way, holding a sheaf of parchments requiring Thorin’s signature. “What’s this, then?” he asked, evidently surprised.  
“I have come to remind my youngest that he has obligations other than his betrothed,” Dis informed him. “Do not let us distract you.” It was a pointed invitation to him as well as the others in her wake.   
Undeterred, Balin fell into step with Thorin. “Take a look at these while I’ve got you, cousin.”  
Thorin obliged, sighing, glancing over the papers as their small procession came to a top outside the door of Kili’s chambers. The outer door opened to show the living area standing empty. There were two pairs of boots flung to the far corners of the room and a tunic on the floor that Dis recognized as her son’s. One of the chairs between the main door and the bedchamber door had been overturned.   
“Mother,” Fili tried again, but quieted when she gave him a look. Nori snickered as Dis marched across the room to the bedchamber door. A tray of very neatly stacked used dishware sat on the floor just outside it.  
She raised a fist and rapped very smartly on the door. “Kili! Open this door at once!”  
Silence.  
“I know you’re in there!”  
Not a sound.  
“I believe they’re just going to be quiet until we go away,” Fili theorized.  
“Yes, let’s,” Balin suggested readily. “Is there any bacon left?”   
Ignoring them, Dis knocked again. “I’m not leaving! This has gone on entirely too long!”  
“I think there was still bacon,” Dwalin told Balin. “Kili’s not been around to eat it all.” 

 

On the far side of the door, Lucy tightened the seal of her hand over Kili’s mouth to muffle his laughter, narrowing her eyes at him. “She won’t come in here, will she?” she asked tensely, if very quietly. She had been surprised to learn, on her first day, that doors within a dwarvish household were rarely locked. Privacy was rarely desired, among dwarves, and so when it was wanted, it was almost never infringed upon.   
Kili shrugged, his eyes alight with mirth, and Lucy gave him a withering look. It had no visible effect, and she supposed that her fearsomeness was probably diminished by the fact that she was entirely naked and sitting astride him.  
“I’m warning you!” Dis called from the other side of the door, making Lucy wince. “I’ll come in, if need be!”  
“Really?” Lucy demanded nervously, unmuzzling Kili so she could get a proper answer and fumble for a blanket. The lot of their bedding had been kicked down to the foot of the bed.   
“I don’t think she would,” Kili said, chuckling. He caught her arm and drew her in close to him again for a kiss. “It’s alright, Lucy, really.”  
“You don’t think she would,” Lucy retorted, and the bedroom door swung open.

 

There was brief moment that froze everyone in place. Those clustered in the doorway had a great deal to take in. In that instant they suddenly understood why Humans were so fussy about modesty and nudity: their Maker had been far less generous with protective hair and skin than Aulë had.   
There was also the plain fact that Lucy’s bare back was a deeply shock sight, and it was facing the door square-on, facing the headboard as she was, and staring in horror over her shoulder.  
There was the confusing detail of Kili’s right hand tied to the bedpost, although he didn’t seem to be in any distress save that which was caused by the intrusion.  
Lucy moved first, diving for the blankets and burrowing under them, so quickly and successfully that no one saw much of anything besides a great deal of very bare, very delicate-looking skin.  
“Get out!” Kili bellowed.  
“I will do no such thing,” Dis said, the only person present who was unfazed by the proceedings. “I gave you fair warning, and you chose to ignore me. I daresay you will not do so now!”  
“Mother!”  
“Don’t use that tone,” Dis said severely, and Kili’s teeth clacked together instinctively. “This has gone on far too long. You are both adults, and should behave as such. I expect you both dressed and at the breakfast table inside of the half hour, like sensible people, or I will come back. Do you understand?”  
“YES! Now get out!”  
Dis gave him a look to make it clear that his tone had not gone unnoticed, and then swept everybody behind her away from the door and closed it.  
Nori promptly started laughing, and Fili began to grin. “Why was he tied up, do you think?” he asked, and Nori laughed harder. Dwalin began to chuckle. Thorin still had the wide-eyed look of someone who’d taken a stout blow to the back of the head.  
“None of that, please,” Dis said, grimacing. “We still have breakfast to return to.”  
“I do hope there’s bacon,” Balin said distractedly, shuffling through his papers again.

 

Studying the lump Lucy made in the covers, Kili picked at the knot binding his wrist to the bedpost. “Lucy?”  
She groaned in answer. “Oh, god, it’s like a nightmare.”  
Kili lifted the edge of a blanket and scooted under, seeking his betrothed. “It’s not terrible.”  
“They saw my back! And my ass!”  
“Probably a bit of your front, too.”  
“Kili.”  
“It’s not that bad,” Kili assured her. He pushed a wad of cloth out of the way and found her face only inches from him. “Really. You know we’re not the same as humans about all of that.”  
Lucy peered at him in the dim light that made it through the wool blankets. “They saw you lashed to the bedpost.”  
Kili began to chuckle. “They’re probably wondering what-all we get up to, in here, if we’re tying each other up.”  
Lucy groaned again, burying her face in the mattress. “It’s a nightmare. That’s it.”  
“Tell me what I’m thinking,” Kili proposed reasonably. “If it’s a dream, you’ll know.”  
“You’re hoping Fili hasn’t eaten all the bacon.”  
Kili laughed. “What do you know! You’re dreaming, then.”  
Lucy smiled despite herself, lifting her face enough to look at him. He did seem entirely unconcerned about the entire incident. The air under the blankets was getting close and hot quickly with the two of them breathing it, so she cast the covers off with a sigh. “If it’s a dream, your mother won’t really come back in half an hour,” she pointed out.  
He pulled a face. “I wouldn’t take it that far.”  
“We could bar the door,” Lucy suggested, and he laughed again.  
“How would we get food, then?”  
“Hmm. I suppose we had better go, then.” Lucy sighed. “What did we do with my clothes, again?”  
“I don’t remember, but the things you left here are in the drawers over there.” Kili indicated with his chin, rolling out of bed and reaching for a tunic that he was fairly sure was clean. “I’ve had them washed every few weeks so they don’t smell odd.”  
Touched, Lucy got out of bed to kiss him on the cheek. “Thank you.”  
Kili shrugged, smiling. “It was no matter. I knew you’d be back sooner or later.”  
Lucy felt a twinge. “I’m sorry I was gone so long.”  
“No need for sorry. I wasn’t worried.” He looked around. “I am worried, however, about finding a pair of trousers in this mess.”  
“You’re the one that made it a mess,” Lucy pointed out.  
“You helped!”  
“It was like this when I arrived!” she protested, which was true, except that her clothes hadn’t been on the floor, and the air had smelled like clean stone and candle wax instead of sex.  
She could only imagine that those were improvements.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know I've sort of inundated you with chapters today, but I feel bad about the long wait. Originally I thought that meant three chapters, but after the last chapter I wanted to end on a more pleasant note, so you get four. :)


	13. Just a Little

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rated E for rough sex. And finally no one is injured! Yay!  
> Set sometime after Lucy has returned from her visit to Hobbiton.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My father is very ill and recently contracted pneumonia as a further complication of the initial illness. It was not good, but the pneumonia is now gone. That seems the simplest and least painful way to explain why it's why it's been such a horribly long time since I posted, and I apologize to any and all readers I am lucky enough to retain. I might have said something sooner, but frankly, AO3 quite escaped my mind for a few weeks, there being other matters at hand.  
> I hope that circumstances will permit me to post the rest of this work, and potential subsequent works, in a timely and reliable fashion, and it seems that it may be so. Thank you to anyone who's still reading for your patience.

Lucy draws her left arm across her chest and holds it there, feeling a pleasant burn in the fatigued muscles of the shoulder. There is a much less pleasant ache, too, but it isn’t strong enough to be distracting. Kili offers much more distraction, though he is simply placing their practice swords in their correct places on the weapons racks. She eyes the breadth of his shoulders appreciatively, more easily discerned, and not diminished, by his lack of tunic. Sweat makes his shirt stick to his skin, revealing more.  
They’d spent a happy afternoon on the practice courts with friends. Lucy prides herself on besting everyone but Nori at hand-to-hand, though it is hard to say if she really beats Kili or not, because their attempts to spar almost always become too indecent for public and have to be aborted before either gains an upper hand. The small practice party broke up midway through its third hour, when everyone began to want a meal and a bath, and Lucy waged another unsuccessful campaign against drinking ale directly after strenuous physical activity.  
And while her left arm is quite sore from the strain, she thinks she’s still up to a little more strenuous activity.  
Kili turns from a brief inspection of his rack’s loose leg just in time to see Lucy peel her damp shirt off over her head. Her back comes into view, shining sweat in the lantern light, crisscrossed by scars and by that frankly uncomfortable-looking harness, the chestcloth. He feels a lurch of physical heat in his gut, and another, quieter pleasure – she takes off her shirt so casually, now, when it’s only the two of them, though he can tell it isn’t entirely unselfconscious. There’s still a slight hesitation, a shift of her shoulders like she wants to turn around.  
She doesn’t, though, and he admires the muscles shifting under her skin as she drops the shirt into the laundry basket. “Glad to see that go,” he remarks. “Been driving me to distraction for hours now.” It’s true – by the time she took off her tunic to cool off, she’d already gotten so sweaty the shirt was close to useless – clingy, the thin white linen nearly transparent in places.  
“Mmm.” Lucy’s eyes are very warm, in a familiar way, and she kisses him soundly, twining her arms around his neck. The left complies with this course of action stiffly, but it does comply without clipping Kili in the ear, which is a recent improvement. “Glad I’m not the only one.”  
Kili lets out a startled laugh. “I can’t imagine that I, in my oldest shirt, being bounced up and down the courts by half the people we know, have aroused your lust.”  
“So you don’t like this shirt?” Lucy raises an eyebrow.  
“Not really.”  
He doesn’t understand what idea this triggers in her mind, but he recognizes the sudden wicked light in her eyes. “Are you very tired?” she asks lightly, her fingers teasing one of his ears.  
His cock twitches at the oblique suggestion, its interest piqued ever since Lucy started shedding unnecessary articles of clothing some hours ago, and Kili answers with a firm kiss. Lucy responds so ardently that it takes him by surprise. “You don’t – want – baths, first?”  
“No.” Lucy licks a clean stripe through the sweat on Kili’s temple, and he swears at the deep throb in his cock. “Do you?”  
“Nmmph.” His reply is muffled in another kiss, this one momentarily salty. His mind starts to go, as it generally does when Lucy starts kissing him the particular way she does when she has certain acts on the mind – flicking her tongue against the underside of his, sucking just slightly. It’s the best kind of maddening; he throbs, his smallclothes uncomfortably tight, but forces one eye open to gauge the distance between them and the bed.  
“No need,” Lucy gasps in his ear, tugging with the laces of his breeches. “Floor – wall –”  
“Hard,” Kili grunts, and Lucy gooses him through the front of his irritatingly resistant trousers.  
“So you are.”  
“No – floor n’ wall’re stone.”  
Lucy draws back, though her fingers remain hooked in the waistband of his breeches, to regard him with some surprise. Kili returns the look, unsure why this comment brought them to a full stop.  
“You do know I’m not going to break, don’t you?” Lucy asks. It’s not an accusation – she’s genuinely surprised.  
Kili reserves comments on this. Lucy has broken, many times. Her bones are weaker than his; his muscles are stronger.  
“You think I will.”  
“I don’t think you’re weak,” Kili says quickly, reaching for her hips and drawing her in again.  
“No, not weak . . . fragile?” Lucy kisses him almost absent-mindedly, her face thoughtful. She’d describe most of their sexual encounters as energetic, and of course gratifying, but now that she thinks of it, there have never been any accidental bruises, no love bites that didn’t fade by morning. They spent a full forty-eight hours in bed together, too, and had the soreness to show for it, but even that first time, after months apart, Kili was . . . careful.  
“I know I’ve been grievously injured for a great deal of the time we’ve known each other, but you do know that’s not really typical? I mean – god, Kili, you don’t have to worry you’ll hurt me. Not to say you couldn’t, and no more to say I couldn’t hurt you, if I had a mind to, but of course I don’t any more than you do.”  
“Alright,” Kili says, feeling somewhat abashed and still definitely aroused. “Wall, then?”  
Lucy gives him a look, but changes her mind, and her tact, so quickly that he almost doesn’t notice. Planting a firm hand on Kili’s chest, she backs him into the wall, and kneels as gracefully as she can (which, after an afternoon of sparring, is not very). The laces prove more cooperative when nearer to eye level, and Lucy slides her knees apart to adjust for height difference, almost sitting. Looking up at Kili through her lashes, she catches one of his hands, plants the tail of her braid in his palm, turns his wrist several times to wrap the braid around his hand, and then closes his fingers into a fist, his knuckles snug against her skull.  
Then she swallows him to the root with no warning whatsoever. “Fuck!” Kili cries, his hips hitching forward involuntarily. His fingers seize around her braid, pulling her hair, and he can feel her throat ripple. “Sorry! Sor–”  
Lucy nips that in the bud by squeezing his balls just a little tighter than might be comfortable, releasing just as quickly. Kili cuts himself off in a strangled sound that is likely another expletive. When there’s no protest of actual pain, Lucy begins to move, sliding off only an inch or two and back to his base, her eyes drifting closed as she feels the coil of heat between her legs tighten. His sweat tastes different, here, much stronger and muskier, but still not unpleasant, since he was clean to start with. Lucy has no objection to a healthy, new sweat – it’s only after nervousness, or illness, or several days without a wash that it smells and tastes objectionable.  
When she can feel Kili beginning to get close – the fingers in her hair tightening again, the muscles in his thighs vibrating, his balls drawing up – Lucy draws off. A string of spit and precome follows, and she glances up to meet Kili’s eyes. His eyes are dark, hooded, and when she licks at the string to break it, he swears in Khuzdul and lets his head fall back to knock against the wall, stone or not.  
Something warm and hard lances along his length, a dangerously keen edge, and Kili bucks off the wall at the intense surge of pleasure-pain, seeing stars. He gasps for breath, shocked that he didn’t come, and feels pressure around the base of his shaft just as Lucy releases it, standing.  
She kisses him, and he surges into it with enough force to take them a step away from the wall, his tongue thrusting deep into the wet heat, shocked again to feel a sharp nip. He bites back, catching her lip, and the third shock of the day tastes like blood. There is no time or space for horror or regret, though, because Lucy tastes it, too, and she kisses him so hard she can feel the imprint of his teeth for one strange moment, fisting both hands in his shirt. The fabric is so old and tired that it rips easily, just as she’d earlier thought that it would. “Do you see?” she gasps. Kili growls an affirmative low in his throat, and Lucy feels herself throb at the sound, digs her fingertips into the muscle of his back to get purchase on his slick skin. 

Kili drops his hands, catches Lucy behind the knees, and topples her effectively onto the bed, though he’s not sure how they came to be beside it. He straddles her hips with his knees, and she pulls him down before he can enjoy the view, wrestling her chestcloth off over her head as he grapples with her leggings and smalls, all gone in moments.  
She lashes her legs around him and pulls him in with a sharp cry. Kili gasps, his forehead hitting her collarbone, wrestling with his self-control. It vanishes when she rocks her hips, hot slick, tight walls rippling around him. He thrusts forward much too hard and stills himself again, but Lucy arches and moans, “Please, Kili, yes, so good, fuck –” and so he repeats the motion, all thought disintegrating in the waves of pleasure that rock them both with every hard drive of his hips, met with one of Lucy’s, canted at an angle so he rubs inside her just so, working the coil of heat tighter and tighter.  
He’s only vaguely aware of the headboard cracking against the wall, distant compared to Lucy’s moans, and the almost overwhelming desire to swallow the sounds has him sucking and biting her breasts, in easier reach of his mouth than hers. He twists one nipple quite hard and feels her come suddenly undone, a sudden rush of slick heat where she is clenching him like a fist. Lucy screams his name and Kili comes with a hoarse cry of his own.  
There are several long, buzzing, fuzzy moments before Lucy comes back into her head, but however long they were, she’s back before Kili. She very carefully rolls them over so he’s on his back, shifts off of him, gasps a little as he slides free, and then flops onto her own back again for a long, catlike stretch. Her joints feel agreeably loose, even her left shoulder, if not especially it, and as the endorphin high loses its immediate edge she can feel a sweet, tender ache in her belly. She presses the heel of her hand into it and hums, pleased.  
Kili shifts onto his side next to her, blinking a little blearily. “That was rough,” he observes.  
Lucy smiles at him, amused. “Did I hurt you?”  
“No – well –” He reaches back to palm his own ass, his expression quizzical. “When did you –? I’m going to have a bruise, I think.”  
“More like nine,” Lucy suggests, holding up her hands, and Kili laughs and seizes her hand, kissing each fingertip and then the scar that marks the missing digit. Then he kisses the back of her hand and falls forward, his face pressed against her belly.  
“I’m shocked I didn’t hurt you,” he admits into it, the usually firm muscles now much more forgiving of his nose than usual, lax as they are,  
“Just a little, perfectly.” Lucy indulges in another, smaller stretch. “I’ll feel you whenever I move, the next few days.” It’s a pleasant prospect. She’s always liked that, shifting in an uncomfortable chair or saddle and being jolted unexpectedly out of boredom or worry by the reminder of other things.  
Kili shivers a little, a warm kind of shiver, and lifts his head just enough to drop a kiss below her navel. Lucy scrubs a hand into his hair and leaves it there. “Fili’s going to be mad,” Kili mumbles, though he is rapidly losing the energy to be either concerned or amused at the prospect. He yawns. “Made a terrible racket.”  
Lucy feels an answering yawn bubble up. It was a long day even before the sparring, and now a nap before dinner seems entirely in order. Then baths, of course, or possibly just one bath for the two of them. Warm water is almost more enticing than the bed, but not quite.  
Kili almost forgets it, but his head comes up suddenly, startling Lucy into wakefulness, too. “Did you bite my cock?” he demands indignantly, and Lucy laughs very loud and very hard, her whole body bowing into a knot with it, and Kili tickles and wrestles her into submission, which is easy to do when she’s helpless with laughter.  
“No! I didn’t, I swear!” she giggles breathlessly when he relents, grinning. “I just scraped it a little – perfectly!”


	14. Not a Dwarf

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Somewhat meandering chapter, which I wrote before the one preceding; mostly a lot of little bits of everyday life in my head needed a chapter to live in, so this one is good if you're curious about that. No smut, unfortunately.

Lucy frowned at the half-finished chart in her lap. She had been a linguistics student at an earlier point in her life, but she could only remember a little more than half of the International Phonetic Alphabet now. Memory had proved a poor keeper of archives; some information from a decade ago had been lost, and her much-smudged and rewritten chart showed for it.  
Kili had begun teaching her Khuzdul against advice from his uncle that he wait to do so until he and Lucy were actually married. Dwarves guarded their spoken language more closely than their wealth. They said it had been handed down to them from the very lips of their god, and had remained unchanged since that day. They didn’t even learn it as infants, Lucy had been surprised to learn, but instead learned it as part of their schooling later, to prevent natural corruption from occurring. She imagined that dwarf parents probably spoke Khuzdul in front of children to keep conversation from them the same way American parents would spell words rather than speak them.  
“If you cannot pronounce something, it is better that you avoid using the word at all,” Balin had advised, once it had been ruled that Lucy would be taught at all. It had been subject to much discussion both within and without Erebor, with dwarf lords whose names Lucy had never even heard weighing in. “Even such incidental, personal change as an accent would not be well-received.”  
Lucy hadn’t been phased by that warning. She could speak the harsh language of Mordor with only a mild accent; she was sure she could master the milder inflections of Khuzdul with the fading vestiges of her linguistic training.  
So far, she had met her own expectations. Occasionally, the subtlety of a certain sound escaped her, and she couldn’t remember how to shape her mouth, throat, lips, and tongue to produce it. Then she pressed her fingertips to Kili’s prickly throat, bracketing his larynx, to feel the muscles at play while he spoke, staring into his mouth as well as she could. He found the method ticklish, amusing, and absurdly clever, but the IPA chart had initially worried him.   
“Couldn’t someone else make use of it?” he’d worried  
“Not unless there’s someone else from my world running around Middle Earth,” Lucy had assured him. “And even then, they’d have to be a certain kind of scholar. What’s more, this mess has nothing about it to indicate that a connection to Khuzdul even to such a scholar. It’s just a map of sounds. It applies to all languages, any language.”  
“You should show Ori,” Kili had suggested. “He would love it. I don’t think we have anything like it. I wouldn’t tell anyone what you’re using it for, though.”  
She didn’t want to show Ori until it was done, though. Half a thing made a poor gift. Sighing, Lucy glanced at the time-telling candle. The darker wax bands striping the column indicated the hour; this candle showed that it was nearly two in the afternoon. She’d been working since noon, and her head buzzed with so many sounds that she decided to leave the chart for another day.   
Sitting back in her chair, Lucy considered her options. Over the past several weeks, she’d begun to settle into life in Erebor. It was a largely unfamiliar feeling. In the mornings, she did calisthenics and went for a run outside, finding the world still dewy, chill, and half-asleep. Usually Kili was still asleep when she returned, and she woke him up in some favorable manner before they joined his relatives for breakfast. They then parted ways so Kili could tend to what few duties fell to him as the second-born prince. Lucy occupied herself exploring while he was gone, or assisted some friend or another with their work; that usually meant holding and carrying things. Often she worked with Ori, or with Oin, as their fields of work drew on her own interests.   
About once a week she found herself wandering out to Dale at this time of day. Sometimes she made it as far as Esgaroth, returning around dinnertime, although she generally tried to give Kili forewarning on those days, so he wouldn’t worry. It was strange to her to have someone waiting for her appearance at mealtimes, noting her comings and goings, but it felt oddly grounding, like the pleasant weight of her old, much-weathered jerkin, which accompanied her on any expedition beyond the Gates of Erebor.  
If she hadn’t wandered too far, she and Kili took lunch together, usually in the form of a picnic on the Mountainside, and then parted again, although Lucy sometimes found that her desire to keep Kili’s company outweighed her concern over appearing codependent to observers. Sometimes, she spent the afternoons on the training courts, sparring friends or any strangers who would agree to it. Many dwarves refused on grounds that they would injure her, or simply to remind her that she was not welcomed by most.  
It was a comfortable pattern. Lucy wasn’t sure how long she could adhere to it before her wanderlust seized her again, but for the time being, she was content.  
Knowing that Kili was with his brother all afternoon and that Fili missed him of late, Lucy decided not to seek them out. She didn’t feel like seeking out a sparring partner, either, since doing so would either require crisscrossing the city to find one of the Company who wasn’t busy, or trying to engage with a stranger.  
Dwalin had mentioned that he would be in the smithy that afternoon; he was in charge of the Royal Guard these days, among other things, but under a healer’s advice Thorin required him to take afternoons off every few days. Doubtless the healer, and Thorin, imagined that he would use the time to rest his leg – not to hobble around the smithy instead of hobbling around his office.   
Lucy abandoned her IPA chart and left the desk in the living room to change into clothes she wouldn’t mind singeing before striking out for the smithy Dwalin favored.  
She was relieved to find him there; while she was more or less sure that she had license to work here without supervision from a friend, she was also more or less sure that she lacked the skill to do so without some small disaster. Last week’s burn throbbed on her arm as a reminder, and she had been under Dwalin’s watchful eye then.   
He greeted her aloud, as the forge was empty but for them and two others, a pair Lucy knew by face but not name, who were collaborating on some elaborate mechanical project which required an impossible number of cogs and gears. The din, therefore, was not so loud that Iglishmêk was favored over speech.   
It had come as a surprise to everyone but Lucy herself that she was strong enough to manage any metalwork, although, as a beginner, she still only worked with the softest materials. Dwarves knew that humans could accomplish the task, if not with the same degree of skill, but human smiths were almost invariably male, and hulking. Very few of her friends in the Company had ever had occasion to notice her musculature, occluded by layers of clothing as it usually was, but Lucy was back to her usual level of fitness of late, for the first time since the encounter with the goblins during the Quest. She had supposed, entering the forge, that if she could bench press nearly her own body weight, she could very likely manage a hammer – even though it had been heavier than she expected.  
She knew that she’d never make anything impressive, or even up to Dwarvish standards, but insinuating herself in the forge served a different purpose. Dwarves saw her doing something they respected, and doing it passably well. She, in turn, observed an important aspect of their culture – art, religion, and economy all came back to this. And one of the reasons she’d survived this long was that she never turned down a chance to learn a new skill.  
Dwalin took a break from his work to instruct Lucy in the wire-making process, the next basic skill traditional instruction dictated she learn. Her attempts to heat the soft tin to the correct temperature had her wire losing its shape as it was drawn, or snapping off every few inches. Dwalin tried to hide his amusement at her frustration, but he wasn’t very successful.   
Lucy tried to work with her shirt on, for a while, but even with only a few fires going, the heat was soon unbearable, and she stripped it off. It had initially seemed insane to expose any more bare skin than necessary to the dangers of the hot metal on all sides, but on Lucy’s first day she had quickly decided that it was more insane to wear unnecessary articles of clothing in temperatures that exceeded a hundred and twenty degrees – humans smiths managed it, but they worked in open, well-ventilated areas, not close, underground caves. She had assured herself that no one would give her more than a passing glance when they had their own work to attend to; occasionally, curious or admiring looks did stray to her back, but Dwalin was always quick to glare over her shoulder to deter them, so quick that Lucy never even noticed the attention.  
The dilemma of protection versus heatstroke was a nonissue with dwarves, Lucy had noticed, as their skin was thicker and tougher than hers; they were far less prone to burns, and also seemed better suited to the oppressive heat. She’d seen Dwalin grasp metal that had been glowing only seconds before in his bare hand, to no obvious ill effect. Callused as her own hands were, she was leery of touching anything that wasn’t still dripping from a dunk in the water barrels.  
By around five in the evening, Lucy finally managed to produce a respectable length of serviceable wire, if in a metal so soft as to be nearly useless. It did allow her to call it a day without losing face, though, and she did so gladly.   
Parched and literally dripping sweat, she wandered first into the royal kitchens, where she grabbed a skin of salted tomato juice from her stash in the cool room and attempted to chug it down too quickly to taste. Failing that, she took quick gulps as she made her way next to the nearest bathhouse. Lucy didn’t like anyone else to see her scars when she could help it, but the alternative was to ask servants to draw a bath in her and Kili’s rooms, and servants made her intensely uncomfortable. She ducked them at every possible turn, even sneaking in and out of the kitchens so the cooks wouldn’t lose time at their work insisting that they help her.  
She had discovered, however, that the baths hosted a room with cool pools, and that no one else ever really seemed to use them. After years of bathing in streams and rivers – sometimes when there was snow on the ground, if she was feeling too gamey to care – she hardly noticed the temperature. Privacy was privacy.  
It was harder to sneak in and out of a bathhouse, as the rooms were large and bare, but she usually managed it to the degree of success that entire rooms didn’t fall to silence and staring as she passed through them. Today was one such day; it helped that people seemed to be getting used to her presence, however grudgingly.   
While bathing, Lucy choked down the most of her noxious drink. She had concocted the recipe to replace electrolytes shortly after arriving in a world where premade sports drinks were unavailable. Even years later, she hadn’t gotten used to the taste. Kili had once taken a curious and incautious sip and sprayed it everywhere once the taste hit his tongue.  
Clean, she pulled on clean clothes – dwarvish clothes. Dis had had them made for her to indicate that Lucy was forgiven for her overlong visit to the Shire. Lucy appreciated the gesture, and the clothes. The layers kept out the underground chill more effectively than Lucy’s old things, and she found the weight of the heavy, embroidered wool comforting in its familiarity. It felt almost like the weight of her jerkin, which she had lived in for years but which Thorin preferred she did not wear in Erebor. He had seen too many weapons appear from its linings, even during the relative brevity of their acquaintance, to sanction it.   
Warmth and weight aside, Lucy liked her new appearance, too. Clothing originally designed for stocky dwarves suits her own figure, which is stocky and curvy by human standards, and muscular to the degree that most men didn’t care for, though Kili often marvels at how slender she seems to him. She’s admired the knots and embroidery of dwarvish clothing from the first occasion she had to notice it, too. The tunic and over robe offer many useful pockets of varying shapes and sizes. And it all makes her look a bit more like she fits with Kili. She always gagged at couples who wore matching outfits, in her world, but this, to her, seems a pleasant way of indicating that they belong together, while the simple fact that she was human still holds her enough apart for her own comfort.  
Lacking the ability to braid her own hair, especially in the elaborate manner dwarvish decorum suggests, Lucy sets off to find Kili so he can do the task for her. She whistles as she walks and ignores the few disapproving looks that passerby bother to give her. Many people seem to be giving up their campaign of cold looks and borderline rude remarks simply because they have no obvious effect. To keep up animosity in the face of blatant indifference is pointless and tiring.   
It is by then nearing the end of the day, so Lucy directs herself to the royal quarters, and then Dis’ suite, where the family meals are generally taken. If nothing else, she’ll be politely early for dinner.  
The door is standing slightly ajar when she approaches, which she has learned indicates, in the open-doored, lock-free households of dwarves, that passersby are welcome to enter. She supposes such a system arose because it is a colossal pain dragging heavy stone doors open and shut all day.  
There are voices within, very animated voices, and at the sound of her own name, Lucy comes to a stop just outside. She has not survived eight years in an alien and dangerous world by having many scruples, in odd contrast to her general good manners.  
“– only because it takes years to learn!”  
She identifies Kili easily, by voice, and his uncle next with as little trouble. Thorin sounds annoyed, but not dangerously so. Lucy is very familiar with the various colorations of Thorin’s voice that bespeak ill will.  
“I told you to wait.”   
“And I’ve told you why I disregarded that.” Kili’s cross, too.  
“Do be sensible,” Dis warns. Lucy isn’t as good at reading her tones yet, though she has been treated to a wide range of them.   
“I am being sensible. It takes years to learn our language, and I don’t want people talking over Lucy’s head for any longer than it takes her to learn. You know what people say, and within my earshot, no less.” Kili’s tone is now almost pleading.   
Lucy has, of course, noticed that people talk over her head, and she can even guess the sort of thing that was being said, but perhaps it’s worse than she assumed if that’s the reason Kili began teaching her Khuzdul ahead of schedule. How bad could it be? She spent her childhood being called a mick by children from the next neighborhood over, which was predominantly Italian, and race is even more of a free-for-all subject in this world.  
“It is concession enough that she is being allowed to learn at all!” Thorin scolds, interrupting her rumination. “Marriage to you is what will grant her the privilege of learning Khuzdul, and not mere betrothal!”  
Lucy is beginning to wish Kili had just waited.   
“She has earned her way!” She hears a rustle and knows he’s stood up. “Every day she learns more of our ways, our life, our religion, even. Why not our language?”   
“Yes, we’ve all seen her at the forges, but she’s not a Dwarf, Kili!”  
“I know that!”  
“Does she?”  
Lucy walks in before Kili can draw out the scolding any longer. “Yes.” Lucy speaks not quietly, but not loudly, either – level, steady. She looks at Thorin, and glances around the room. Fili is seated by the fire, looking keenly uncomfortable, and Dis sits near him, knitting at a rabid pace. Kili, as she’d thought, is standing, and so is Thorin. Her gaze resettles on him.  
“I do,” she repeats. “I understand that I’m not being offered any kind of an – adoption, I suppose we’d call it. And if I were, I don’t know that I’d accept. I’m not particularly attached to my own kind, but nor do I feel a need to diverge from my race completely. I know who and what I am.”   
She wonders how long it will be before circumstances stop dragging these odd speeches out of her; they’re draining. Perhaps most engagements were this overwrought.  
“You see me learning and doing more every day simply because I admire your race, without wanting to join with it. I believe that I would admire you even were Kili not my betrothed – the more I learn, each day, the more deeply I feel an appreciation, and the more keenly I feel what I do not yet know. I am happy to be among you, and overjoyed to stand with Kili – but that’s all that I ask. That I be allowed to stay here, with him. To that end, we will discontinue my education until after the marriage. I’ll go change right now, in fact. Plenty of time before dinner.”  
Doing an excellent job of hiding her disappointment, Lucy turns to make good on the last, but Dis’ voice stops her.   
“There’s no need for all of that, Lucy,” she says. “The clothes were a gift, and of course I expect you to wear them. If you didn’t, it would quite defeat the point. Your hair does need braiding before dinner, however; I expect Kili hasn’t thought to teach you that, though you’ve been mastering such useful talents as metalwork.” Lucy never thought she’d hear a dwarf place even the faintest dismissive emphasis on ‘metalwork’, but now she has. “We will simply have to occupy the time you formerly set aside for Khuzdul with braiding, and you can tend to it yourself in no time.”  
Kili stares at his mother for a moment, but Dis ignores him and everyone else to count stitches in her knitting, for all appearances absorbed by her task. Then Kili follows Lucy out into the hall and makes quick work of the hair under her right ear, which is beginning to fall in permanent waves from the near-constant braid.  
“Is your mother always so difficult to predict?” Lucy asks, too quietly for Dis and Thorin’s older ears to overhear.   
“Oh, yes,” Kili replies, smiling. “And don’t expect to get used to it, either.”  
“Wonderful. And when she said ‘we’, she did actually mean . . .”  
“The pair of you, yes. I expect you’ll have great fun together.” He beams and kisses her on the cheek, and Lucy grimaces.

 

Dis and Lucy embark on their new enterprise the very next evening, the latter displaying visible nervousness. Kili offers her an encouraging smile from across the living area, occupied with an old historical text Thorin wants him to read. Fili sits at his side, whittling, and everyone else is similarly occupied.  
The braiding lesson quickly comes to a halt when it becomes clear that Lucy can’t get her left arm anywhere near high enough to braid her own hair. She can laboriously manage a simple single braid by hitching her left wrist onto her left shoulder and hooking it there so her fingers can work, but it’s difficult, surprisingly painful, and slow. This is discussed quietly, and on Lucy’s part, reluctantly.  
Dis’ gaze sweeps the room for a solution, and lands on the obvious one. Saving his place in the book with a finger, Kili moves across the room, plops himself onto the floor before the settle shared by his mother and betrothed, and subjects himself to their attentions.  
First his hair has to be brushed out, since it’s always tangled, and Dis clicks her tongue reprovingly over the state of the knots. Having one’s hair brushed is distracting enough when trying to read, but the clucking makes it almost impossible.   
“That may be partially my fault,” Lucy offers, thinking of the treatment she gave the dark locks that morning and shifting uncomfortably on the settle as heat pools in her gut.  
“Don’t be ridiculous. Kili’s a grown Dwarf, he’s perfectly capable of keeping up with his own grooming.” Dis gives her son a smart rap on the crown of his head with the comb, and he flinches. Fili stifles a chuckle, but is somber-faced over his carving when Dis glances his way. Thorin’s mustache twitches in amusement as he works his way through a pile of documents that need review. Dwalin and Nori return to their murmured conversation on the matter of weapons-grade steel.  
Once the knots are out, Kili once again opens the book, thinking the worst is over, but he’s shocked to feel that the tugging on his much-abused scalp is far from over. “Ouch!” he complains as Lucy struggles with a very basic pattern.  
“I’m sorry – is your head really that sensitive? You hardly notice when I yank it usually.”  
“Because usually –” Kili explains, and then cuts himself off so abruptly that everyone in the room becomes either very amused or very uncomfortable. Lucy and Dis both fall into the second camp, and Lucy yanks on the strand of hair again, this time in reprobation.  
Kili stares very hard at his book as Fili snickers.  
“No, not like that – under the left, yes. Draw it snug, now, or the braid will be lopsided. You have to maintain the tension, do you see. Do you knit?”  
“Um . . . no,” Lucy replied, distracted by the braid. There were four strands instead of three, but that didn’t really account for how much more difficult this was.  
“Sew?”  
“Ah, not really, not beyond fixing a split seam.” It was difficult to keep the tone of apology out from creeping into her voice, but Lucy managed it. Kili’s shoulders twitched as her firm tone resulted in a firm tug, and she patted the top of his head.  
“Ye stitch wounds,” Dwalin volunteers helpfully.  
Dis nods, relieved. “Yes, well, when you stitch a wound, I’m sure, you want the stitches to be all as exactly alike as you can manage. It’s the same here. You want each twist of hair, each knot, to be precise.”  
Lucy nods; she isn’t struggling with the concept, but with the mechanical application thereof. She knows Kili’s hair is soft, but she hadn’t known that would mean that the braid above her fingers would slip apart when she tried to continue it below. How could you hold the upper section together while working in more? How is this so different than braiding her own hair, which she managed her entire life before her shoulder injury? She tries pulling the strands tighter, and Kili’s trapeziuses tighten, too. Having a younger brother had in no way prepared her for this.  
“I’m usually so good with my hands,” she frets, aware that Dis will form impressions of her merit based on these lessons.  
“That you are,” Kili agrees, and scowls at Fili when he chortles again.   
After struggling for an inordinate length of time, Lucy manages to finish the braid, which is uneven in the extreme. She doesn’t like to leave it like that, but the other option is to continue to torture Kili’s poor head and her fraying temper. There’s nothing for the nerves quite like failing miserably at an unfamiliar task under the unforgivingly perceptive gaze of her formidable mother-in-law-to-be.  
“It’s very good, I’m sure,” Kili lies, reaching up the probe Lucy’s handiwork. His eyebrows go up, though, when he feels the result of all the concentration and patience on all parts. “What’s important is that you finished it.”  
The others look up at this, naturally, and Fili grins broadly. “Well, look at that!” he proclaims. “We’ve finally found something Lucy’s not good at!”  
Lucy whips the comb at him, and Fili ducks and hunches his shoulders so it bounces off harmlessly as he laughs. “I have one less finger to work with, you insensitive beast,” she scolds, but she has to try not to laugh, too. Kili doesn’t try, chuckling as he shifts up onto the settle between her and his mother.   
“I don’t care how it looks,” he assures Lucy, kissing her cheek. “I’ll wear it till the end of time, if you like.”  
“Please don’t. I’d hate for anyone else to see it. It’s hard to say which of us they’d think less of for the sight.” Lucy eyes the sad braid ruefully.  
“It’s perfect,” Kili declares.  
“It’s a start,” Dis states, and allows her smile to show as she watches Lucy and Kili pitch a small battle over whether or not the braid will remain intact (presumably until the end of time) or be unraveled on the spot. Perhaps they’d make a Dwarf out her, after all.


	15. Peter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As suggested by Vanafindiel, a brief visit with Lucy's brother.  
> Time and place are self-evident in the story.  
> Rated T for language. (Yes, really. I'm not always terrible.)
> 
> I plan to revisit Peter later, so don't let this chapter bum you out.

            It’s cool in the church. The air is still; the dust motes visible in the air, where they are caught by light, hardly stir. The silence feels comfortable to Peter. It’s like a thick blanket settling over him, or a coat, weightless in its familiarity, protective in its insulation. The first appeal libraries held for him was not books, but quiet.

            He notices the single other visitor only when she gives a soft cough, shifting on her pew near the altar. It’s an elderly woman, and the sight of her bowed, gray head sends a pain through him like a wave of sound through a wall: sudden, clear, swift. He buried his grandmother alone, in April, when the ground was soft and the flowers he planted on her grave grew up eagerly. Grass crawled over the scar in the earth before the month wore out, making it seem like she’d been gone longer than she really had.

            Now it’s August, and the grass is withered to pale brown straw under the oppressive heat wave that is bringing the city to its knees. Cool stations have been established to try and keep down fatality rates. PSAs about heat exhaustion and dehydration paper the subway stations, share radio waves with the latest Top 40.

            It’s August 28th, and Lucy has been missing for eight years.

            The bank of candles is against the far wall, before a small statue of Mary, where it has stood since Peter was too small to reach the donation box. Lucy used to lift him up to deposit their money, when they were children. His memory of it is a physical sensation – her short arms wrapped around his waist, just below his ribs, so he felt his bones dig into hers as she hefted him as high as she could, staggering under his weight. She was tall enough to reach, but he always wanted to do it. He always wanted to light the candle, too, but that she did herself, holding the match and box as firmly and carefully as someone holds a gun, or a knife, dangerous objects that must be treated with respect. They always held the lit candle together, her hands overlapping his on the waxy column. _Pray to Mary, Peter._

            He blinks. There are no children before him, in patched secondhand coats or otherwise. He slips a five dollar bill into the donation box, takes up a candle, a book of matches. He selects one, tears it free, sets it to the strip. His fingers still there. To whom will he direct his prayer?

            It’s always been Saint Anthony of Padua, the patron saint of the missing, the vanished. Now he thinks of Saint Jude, unwillingly. The patron saint of lost causes, the hopeless and the despaired.

            In the end, he listens to his sister. He prays to Mary.

           

 

            It’s undeniably strange to knock on the door of his own house. Peter waits on the welcome mat, hands dug deep into his pockets. He always wears out his pockets, always has, digging with his knuckles until the seams split. Lucy used to mend them. Now he does it himself.

            A small thud, a muffled curse, and the sound of stumbling feet precede Brian’s arrival at the door. He squints at Peter through the screen door, scrubbing at his eye with a fist, like a child. The inside of the house is dark as a cave behind him.

            “Hey, Pete,” he grunts, eyes still less than half open. He pushes at the screen door, and Peter opens it and steps inside.

            Brian may be an indisputable bum, but he’s a clean one. The house is always in good shape, however unexpectedly Peter drops by, and, because Brian lacks furnishings of his own, it also always looks disconcertingly like it did the day Peter moved out. Other than the pervasive smell of weed, a collection of gaming systems, games, and DVDs in the den, and Brian’s few alterations to Peter’s room, where he sleeps . . . it looks like Lucy could rattle down the stairs or slam through the back door at any second. His grandfather could come in from the garage, wiping oily hands on a rag. His grandmother could start singing in the kitchen.

            It’s a house full of ghosts. Peter doesn’t understand how Brian can stand to live here. Maybe the weed helps.

            And, as if he can hear Peter’s thoughts, Brian takes a small pipe off the coffee table, already packed, and offers it with a lighter. “Wanna hit?”

            Peter accepts, looks around again as he exhales. He moves to hand the pipe back, and Brian waves a hand at him as he ambles towards the kitchen. Have another.

            “Mikey Donnelly’s gonna swing by later,” Peter calls after him. “That cool?”

            “Who, that old dude?” There’s a crack and hiss from the kitchen, then another: cans opening. “Yeah, he’s cool. Want me to clear out?” Brian reappears with beers in hand.

            “Nah, you’re good.” Peter accepts the beer he doesn’t really want. It will buy him the company he does.

            Brian sips his beer, frowning. It doesn’t suit his face. Lucy used to say Brian reminded her of the Bulgy Bears from the Chronicles of Narnia. Big, dopey, slow, good-natured. How much of that is natural temperament, and how much of that is substance-assisted, Peter has never been sure.

            Mostly what he remembers from the Chronicles of Narnia is the sound of Lucy’s voice as she read them to him.

            “It’s your sister, isn’t it?” Brian asks quietly. “It’s that time of year. I always forget, man, I’m sorry.”

           Peter takes another swill of the beer. The hit he took is starting to mellow him out. “No worries. At least somebody can forget.” He manages to say this without it sounding bitter, which is probably because he means it.

            Brian still looks chagrined. “Do you . . . ah, do you wanna talk about it?”

            It’s a sincere and very kind offer, and Peter can tell that nothing else could ever make Brian more uncomfortable. “Thanks, but that’s what shrinks are for.”

            Brian laughs a little louder than the joke is funny, relieved. “Yeah, I guess so. Where’s –” He casts around as if just noticing an absence. “Where’s, uh, Andy?”

            “I assume still in New York.” Peter sips his beer again. “It ended.”

            A cringe. “Sorry.”

            Peter shrugs. “It was months ago.”

            They end up in the den, watching _Star Trek: The Next Generation_ on DVD. Brian’s Star Trek obsession verges on the pathological. Peter likes it well enough, but he can’t pay attention today.

            It’s a bad year. Some years are harder than others; he isn’t always sure why. One was the worst so far; two, three and four were beyond the pale, too, and six. Seven wasn’t bad: last year, he had a grandmother, a long-term relationship, a cat, a new job Lucy would approve of. Now he has the job. Andy kept the cat.

            And he still has no sister.

 

 

Year One

           

            He was so sure she’d be back long before now.

            They hold a vigil at church, he and his grandmother and Mike. It’s still a shock to see how many people show up. There have been other vigils, search parties, the few press conferences they managed to scare up to raise awareness. All were well-attended, by people who claimed to know and even love Lucy, who Peter had never met before. He doesn’t doubt their claims, for the most part. It just amazes him how Lucy kept everything so separate, like her life was a partitioned high school lunch tray and the foods couldn’t be allowed to touch. He supposes it’s a habit from their childhood, when any one person knowing too much about their situation could lead to a disastrous visit from CPS.

            It doesn’t bother him. She wasn’t – isn’t secretive. She rarely offered information, but if he asked her something, she told him, every time, and she never lied. Peter has seen his sister lie so many times that even though she is a fluid, unblinking, skillful liar, he can tell.

            What bothers him is how long it’s been. He doesn’t understand it. If ever there has been a person who is not a victim, that person is his sister. She is the antithesis of ‘victim’. It is her mindset as much as her various skills. Lucy does not submit; she subverts. She does not obey; she chooses to comply.

            Peter doesn’t believe there is a force on Earth that could contain his sister for this long, and he doesn’t believe that she has been killed. He can’t imagine where she is, or what is happening. He can only assume that she will be back before the second anniversary.

 

 

Year Two

 

            There is still no sign of Lucy. Not an anonymous tip, not a fingerprint, not a drop of blood. Peter remembers one of the first few days that she was gone, standing in the drippy caves, watching the police search dogs lay down on the ground and hang their heads in confusion. The K9 officers didn’t know what to make of this, offered awkward half-baked explanations as to why the dogs would lead them from the campsite to the mountain, up the trail, into a cave, and then suddenly lose the scent. They couldn’t be blamed. It defied explanation.

            It also defies explanation that you can miss a person this much. A few people have told Peter that it gets better with time, but so far it’s getting worse. There’s an immense backlog of things that he needs to tell her, now, events that she must be informed of, jokes she must be told. The pressure is building inside his skull every minute that she’s away, and so is the deep, irrational, unspeakable fear. It is irrational not because it makes no sense, but because it cannot be reasoned away. He refuses to put words to it, but still the fears seethes and grows. _What if?_

 

Year Three

 

            There is a woman on the news who has been recovered from captivity. She was kidnapped as a child and held by her abductor for eleven years. She had two children. Doctors remark that she and the child are recovering remarkably well, are surprisingly normal. It is a triumph of human resilience, they say.

            And Peter thinks that Lucy must be dead, because no one could cage her this long. It would be easier to kill his sister than to hold her. Dead is dead, but if she’s alive, she’s still fighting, and if that were the case, she’d have won by now.

            He tries to practice saying it to the mirror, for the next time someone asks him if he’s an only child. _My sister is dead. Yes, I am an only child. I had a sister, but she died._

            The words stick in his throat. He can’t speak them. They’re unspeakable.

            The next time that someone asks if he’s an only child, the answer comes without thought. “Effectively,” Peter replies, and the asker is so discomfited that the matter is left at that.

            But even that answer doesn’t feel right.

 

Year Four

 

            They take him out drinking, to try to make him forget – not on _the night of_ , of course, but the next night. Peter doesn’t want to go. He shares his sister’s dislike of the taste of most alcoholic beverages, and her disdain for surrendering autonomy to a substance. It’s easier to go, though, to passively allow himself to be pulled on and off the bus, onto a barstool, into a chair, to drink what is put in his hands, than it is to try to remain, with the constant, well-intended texting, calling, knocking on the door, voices through it. _Come on, Peter, come out, this isn’t good for you. Don’t wallow, man, you need a distraction. We care about you, please let us help. Just for a few hours. You’ll feel better. Come on. Please. Come out. Come on._

            He throws up when a girl he doesn’t know climbs into his lap, at the behest of his friends, all of them operating under the assumption that Peter should not be alone. It’s not much vomit, as he manages to choke most of it down out of common courtesy, but he only keeps it down long enough to push off the girl, run outside, and splatter his guts spectacularly over the curb, to the disgusted cries of a couple passing by.

            Peter feels a lurch of primal alarm, but then remembers that, yes, he did drink something red at some point.

            He makes it home with Brian’s help, the one friend he think he’ll keep after tonight. He dozes against Brian’s shoulder on the subway, and Brian lets him, without so much as a _no homo._ Brian is drunk, too, as he usually is, but he functions better than Peter. At the dorm, he gets Peter out of his reeking clothes, though he draws the line at boxers, and wipes him down with a wet towel.

            Peter muzzily expects him to go, but he doesn’t. Brian settles in at Peter’s desk, draping himself over it to sleep, and Peter is glad. He wanted to be alone the whole time that he wasn’t, all night, but when faced with the prospect, his deep and constant sense of loss threatened to overwhelm everything else.

            He throws up again before the night is over, more of the red stuff. It’s fitting that it looks like blood. He feels gutted.

 

Year Five

 

            “Are you an only child?”

            “No, but my sister is gone.”

            “Where? How do you mean?”

            _If I knew, she wouldn’t be gone, would she?_

          “She’s just gone.”

 

Year Six

 

            It amazes Peter that he manages to act so normal for so much of the time. He’s polite. Friendly. Witty. Engaged. He made excellent grade in college, and took an extra class or two every semester, so the fact that he started college at nineteen instead of eighteen, waiting on Lucy, made no difference in the long run. He graduated with honors. He has friends – only one or two, but he doesn’t need more. He dates, every once in a while. He shares his sister’s aversion to most other people. _Most people are careless and foolish and insensitive,_ she said, when their grandmother once fretted that Lucy didn’t have many ties. _Why should I want that? Why do you want that for me? Why shouldn’t I wait for the exceptions?_

            Peter waits for the exceptions. And he waits for his sister. He doesn’t think anyone can really tell that he’s always waiting. He seems so normal, so well-adjusted. People introduce him by saying, _This is Peter Bell, he’s really nice._

            His apartment is tiny, of course, but it’s clean and neat and well-organized (Lucy has always been the messy one). He has an unashamed eye for color and shape, so it’s arranged and semi-decorated in a way most single guys’ places are not.

            He writes a newspaper column. He works in a library. He volunteers to teach a writing workshop to kids in the inner city. He makes gooey caramel fudge brownies that are guaranteed to pull loose teeth. He likes Thai food, but not Korean, and he knows the difference in the first place. He watches the Discovery Channel. He reads National Geographic. He recycles.

            No one would ever imagine that he has spent hours trying to think of how he’ll ever bring himself to tell his missing that the family dog has died in her absence. No one would imagine that he’s thinking of going back to therapy, even though he doesn’t think it helped the first time around.

            But he seems so normal.

            It’s amazing.

           

Year Seven

 

            His grandmother takes him to her support group. Peter expects five people, maybe ten, but there are nearly thirty in the church basement. Even accounting for the fact that many come, like him, as part of a family unit, it’s mind-boggling. This is just for their part of the city. He never knew there were so many people missing from the world. Where do they go? How can so many people be unaccounted for? Is there a tear in the time-space dimension that slowly sucks up children, cousins, sisters, fathers? How does this happen?

            He wishes that they had learned about this group sooner. He wishes he had been going every week for the last seven years. A shrink recommended it, early on, when he still saw a shrink, but Peter had disregarded the idea. He wouldn’t fit in, he wouldn’t relate. Lucy wasn’t like anyone else, so his experience must be different.

            But it turns out, everyone’s missing person is unlike anyone else. Everyone is unique. Everyone is special. Everyone is a fighter.

            Peter has a vivid memory of picking Lucy up from the hospital when he was fifteen and she was nineteen, just before their grandfather died. She was sitting in the waiting room when they arrived, calm, cool, collected, blood-spattered. Her hands were in her lap, cradled in an ice pack.

            His grandmother had told them both what Lucy said on the phone, when she said she needed to be picked up – _A man attacked your sister on the subway. She’s alright, but they want us to pick her up from the hospital. They don’t want her getting home by herself after that._

            He expected Lucy to be crying, or show evidence of it, but instead she was absent-mindedly grinding her scraped knuckles into the ice pack. He sat down with her while their grandparents went to confer with the doctor.

            “Are you okay?”

            “Yeah, I’m fine.” She blinked at him, a little surprised by the question, and he could tell she was telling the truth, even as he could see the swelling around her left eye.

            “What happened?”

            “Some stupid fuck attacked me. Or I should say that he tried to.”

            Lucy was level five in krav maga at that time. Peter wasn’t sure of her ranking in all of the other techniques, but he had seen her spar.

            “Is he here?”

            His sister grinned, lopsided and tired, but genuine. “Nah, but he’ll turn up in a hospital sooner or later, and they’ll know when he does. I marked him up good.”

            Peter’s not surprised that she did, not surprised that she’s smiling, if a little on edge, a little distracted. He is surprised that she let the guy walk. She says she broke his nose, though, and she thinks his wrist, maybe a rib or two. She blacked both his eyes, got in a few knees to the groin, to the gut, kicked out his knee.

            “Although not hard enough,” she added as an afterthought. “I could’ve taken that knee _out_.”

            “It’s good you didn’t,” the cop remarked. He was nearby, having taken Lucy’s statement, but waiting around to reassure the family. “Situations like this, even with a male attacker and a female vic– ahem, I mean when a man attacks a woman,” he corrected quickly, seeing Lucy’s eyes narrow at the first half of ‘victim’, “Even then, if you drop ‘em too hard, a judge will see it as excessive force. Doing the legal system’s job for us, you get it.”

            “I know,” Lucy replied. “My instructors always warned me. Why do you think I didn’t kill him?”

            Peter tucked his hand into Lucy’s chilled one, then, and his head onto her shoulder. She let her head fall against his, and yawned, and she was asleep before their grandparents were ready to go home.

            _Your people aren’t fighters like mine is,_ Peter thinks of the support group people, but he doesn’t feel any grudge towards them. He feels gratitude, and relief, in dizzying amounts. He never knew that so many people were missing. He never knew so many people, like him, had spent years appearing to be recovered, moving on, normal.

           

Year Eight

 

            Mikey arrives at six, toting two sixers. He’s wearing gym clothes. Brian and Peter welcome him in, and they return to the den, where Captain Picard is frozen onscreen, staring regally into the cold distance of space. Peter opens his mouth to say they can change it, but Mike surprises him. “Hey, Star Trek,” he says with surprise. “I used to love that shit. This the one with Spock, or the one with Worf?”

            “Uh, Worf,” Peter says, since Brian looks like he’s gearing up to say that those are far from the only two options.

            “Right, right, I recognize the captain now.” Mikey nods to himself, then holds up the beer. “I, uh, know you’re not a big drinker, but these are the kind Lucy liked, so I figured maybe the taste runs in the family?”

            Peter doesn’t question any part of this offer; he’s touched. “Thanks, I’d like to try one.”

            Brian is studying the label on Mikey’s other six pack with the relaxed concentration of the comfortably baked. “We gonna order pizza or fire up the grill or what?”

            Mike and Peter exchange surprised looks. “Uh, pizza, I guess,” Peter says. “Unless you have stuff for grilling?”

            “No, I don’t,” Brian says, and adds, brightening, “I do have stuff for tacos.”

            “Pizza’s good,” Mikey says quickly, sensing that they can get off track this way. “I’ll go stick these in the fridge.”

            He does, save three: two of his own, which go to himself and Brian, and one of Lucy’s, which goes to Peter. It’s surprisingly fruity. He regards the bottle with surprise, and then orders several pizzas.

            They eat the pizzas, and drink the beers, and Brian works his way through a surprising volume of marijuana with occasional assistance from Peter. He falls asleep in his recliner, and when he starts to snore, Peter pauses the DVD. They’ve changed it twice, now, and touching on several seasons.

            “Getting late,” he sighs.

            “Yeah.” Mike sighs, too. “Lucy like Star Trek?”

            “Not really. She was more, you know. Bookish.”

            That description makes Mikey laugh, quietly, trying not to wake Brian, and Peter laughs, too.

            “And how are you doing, kid?”

            “Oh, you know,” Peter fields lamely, and then changes his mind. There’s no need or call for lying to Mike. “Not great. Last year was better.”

            “It just keeps getting harder, doesn’t it.”

            “Right.” The hurt wasn’t as acute as it first was, when he was seventeen years old and opened the front door to find Mikey on the stoop, and just the question _where is Lucy_ made him start crying then and there. It’s a deeper, more hollow kind of pain now, and it seems to get deeper and more hollow at the same slow, unnoticeable rate that his appearances and day-to-day function improve.

            Mike squeezes the bridge of his nose, rubs his forehead. “I keep – I keep thinking of this thing she said, lately,” he confesses. “After she broke her nose.”

            “Which time?” Peter asks, smiling a little. He turns his head to watch Mike speak, lit in blue highlights and black shadows in the light from the TV.

            “Uh, I wanna say second – second or third, yeah. It was an accident, you know, and she’s sitting there with toilet paper shoved up her nose and she’s got a couple tears going, you know the kind you can’t help, so I say to her, ‘Look, we gotta go to hospital for this one.’”

            It seems almost like that’s the whole story, as Mike lapses into silence, so Peter prompts, “And what did she say?”

            “She says, ‘Yeah, it hurts like a bitch.’”

            Peter is stunned for a moment, and then he laughs out loud. Brian stirs in his chair, and Peter quickly muffles himself, snorting and chuckling into his hand. Mike grins.

            “That’s it?” Peter demands, still smiling. “ _That’s_ the wisdom you wanted to impart?”

            “No, because she wasn’t finished. She says, ‘Yeah, it hurts like a bitch, and it’s gonna keep on hurting.’ And I say if she goes to a doctor, they’ll give her meds, and she says, “Does that really matter?’ So I think about that for a second, and I say, yeah, it does matter, Lucy, because it won’t hurt anymore.”

            “What then?” Peter can’t help himself.         

            “Well, she got kind of New Age just then, I remember thinking it was because of the book she’d been carrying around. I don’t remember which one, but I remember what she said.

            “She said, ‘It doesn’t matter if it hurts, and it doesn’t matter if it’ll get better later, because I won’t waste time just hurting when I have other stuff to do, too.’”

            “And then she went and took a linguistics exam,” Peter concludes, closing his eyes to remember the look on her face when she came in the door, face smiling and swollen. “She came home two hours later with the bruises coming in and asked our grandpa take her to Urgent Care. He said, ‘Young lady, what did you do today?’ and she said, ‘I did really well on my test.’”

            “I didn’t know about the test,” Mike says, and laughs. “She took a test like that?!”

            Peter grins. “Yeah, she liked to work out right before them, to get out of her head so she didn’t stress out too much. She said the proctor almost kicked her out of the exam hall.”

            “I bet!” Mike chuckles, and they settle into quiet again.

            _I won’t waste time just hurting when I have other stuff to do, too._

            Peter knows he hasn’t strictly wasted time, because he is, after all, a well-functioning, successful young adult. He has his ducks in a row, his shit together. He has health insurance and a BA. He has a savings account while most people his age, Brian included, have a pickle jar of pocket change.

            He also has a dark, empty apartment to go home to, half the city away because he can’t bear to stay here, but can’t bear to be more than twenty minutes away in case Lucy comes home. His only friends are an aging gym owner and a known pot dealer, both of whom he sees only every few months. He let his ex steal his cat.

            Peter picks up his most recent bottle, almost empty, long gone warm, and raises it to the ceiling in a silent, directionless toast, to better straits this time next year.

            Maybe Lucy will even be sitting next to him. If he doesn’t really believe it, it doesn’t feel impossible, either.

            He swallows the last sip of beer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you have noticed a format change in this post, so did I. I just don't know what to do about it. I'm so so good with the internet machine.
> 
> And speaking of my own incompetence, a note:  
> 'Eziluk' is the Khuzdul word for 'mithril', which I liked as Kili's pet name for Lucy because she is light, precious, and bright.  
> 'Khelagh' is the Khuzdul word for 'metal', which he has been calling her up until now-ish because 'metal' and 'mithril' were right next to each other in the dictionary I was using.  
> So there's that.


	16. Trousseau

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What is royal Dwarvish lingerie like?  
> Alternate title: Awkward In-Law Bonding.   
> Rated T for nudity and underlying sexual themes, although neither are described in detail.  
> Occurs in Erebor a little more than a year after the BOFA.

            Although the door to Kili and Lucy’s living quarters stood ajar, Dis motioned for the jeweler to come to a stop, as she did. She knocked on the door, and Lucy promptly called, “Come in.”

            The human was sitting by the fireplace in stocking feet, curled up with a book, but when she saw that her visitor was her soon-to-be mother-in-law, Lucy sprang to her feet. It was a well-coordinated spring, Dis noted: both feet firmly on the floor, book closed and dropping to the cushions. Whatever else her son’s choice in mate left to be desired, Lucy did possess admirable fitness and coordination.

            “Good afternoon, Princess,” she greeted, obviously startled.

            “Good afternoon to you as well.”

            Lucy tucked an errant strand of hair behind her ear, acutely aware of it. “Kili isn’t here,” she volunteered. “He and Fili are with Thorin – the king,” she corrected herself.

            “I am aware,” Dis replied. “We have come to see you. May I introduce Koli, daughter of Soli?”

            Dis gestured to her companion, and Lucy executed slight bow – she’d never gotten used to the bowing and curtsying that was polite in Middle Earth, and her new, murkily defined social status made her frequently unsure whether or not it was even appropriate for her to do so.

            “At your service,” Koli said politely.

            “I am Lucy Bell, at yours and your family’s,” Lucy rejoined. Her gaze shifted from Koli to Dis, who noted that she did a passable job hiding her misgivings and mystification. “I apologize for my appearance, Princess – I wasn’t expecting the honor of your company.”

            She was comfortable greeting any of her friends in socks and untucked shirt, but not Dis. Lucy had lived with dwarves for long enough that the slack, messy braid over her shoulder felt like an exposed body part better kept private. The braid was rooted loosely under one ear and not at the back of her head, as she’d done it herself – a normal enough style in her own world, but not here. It was obvious she’d done it as a concession to her limited arm and not as a fashion choice. Koli’s curious gaze was evidence enough of that.

            Lucy would later remember the way her cheeks smarted at that moment and feel the rue of someone who, in hindsight, knows worse to be on its way.

            “It’s quite alright,” Dis assured her, wondering why Lucy would venture into the main room if not ready to greet visitors, or leave its door open in that case. “We are here on a fairly intimate errand, so your attire is not inappropriate.”

            There was a distinct lurch of dread from Lucy’s stomach. “Oh?”

            “Yes,” Dis replied crisply. “Koli is my jeweler of choice, you understand, and I commissioned her to craft a gift to you.”

            “Oh,” Lucy repeated, startled. “Thank you very much. Is there an occasion?”

            “Consider it an early wedding gift,” Dis suggested. “It is your –”

            Lucy, distracted as she was in her eyeballing of the large wooden case in Koli’s arms, hardly caught the Khuzdul word Dis offered in explanation. Dis’ tone did, however, convey meaning, and Lucy asked, “Is it important?”

            To her surprise, again, Dis smiled. “Some would say so. It does, in any case, require fitting.”

            “Alright,” Lucy agreed readily. A bracelet or a ring, then, or maybe some kind of cuff.

            Dis’ brows arched. “Perhaps we should adjoin to the bedchamber?”

            Lucy had a brief but vivid mental image of the bedroom, as she had seen it only half an hour before – stray articles of worn clothing on the floor, a breakfast tray whose more liquid offerings had been put to questionable use, a pillow that had been exiled to the corner under an armchair because it was bleeding feathers, and rumpled sheets that could use the kind of washing which involved scrubbing with rocks.

            She wasn’t sure if it would most offend Dis’ sensibilities, aesthetic, or sense of propriety, but she didn’t intend to find out.      

            “We can do the fitting here,” she told Dis. “If that’s alright.”

            “If you prefer. Koli, would you be so kind as to close the door?”

            Koli obliged, setting her large case on the nearest table before she moved for the door. Now thinking that the gift must be some kind of secret, and relieved that the bedroom had been avoided, Lucy stepped closer, surveying the case with interest as Dis popped its latches. There had to be tools inside, as well, Lucy supposed, because she couldn’t imagine any jewelry that would take up all the space in such a large box – and of odd dimensions, being wide, long, and very flat.

            It would later strike her as odd that her misgivings hadn’t yet resurfaced.

            They did when the case opened, but only because she couldn’t identify the contents. She found herself studying a mass of fine silvery chain that she was pleased to identify not as actual silver, but as mithril. The gift was absurdly expensive, then, which made her somewhat uncomfortable. She intensified her study. Here and there, the chain flowed into delicate, twining pieces which looked like natural extensions of the chain, and which wreathed small stones of white, black, and bluish-purple. Diamonds, she had to guess for the white, and the only black gemstone she knew was onyx (some Dwarf’s fiancée she was). As for the last gemstone, she had no idea.

            Acutely aware of Dis watching her inspection, Lucy extended a hand towards the object (objects?), glancing to Koli for approval. The jeweler nodded, so Lucy tentatively lifted the topmost wreath-like piece. Chains rose with it, as she’d expected. She ended up with a large web of chain and wreath-pieces draped over her hands and forearms, spreading them apart and shifting them around in an attempt to see the function of the piece.

            After a few moments, Lucy gave up. “It’s very beautiful,” she said, to soften the blow. It was true, too. “But I’m afraid I don’t know what it is.”

            Koli gave a startled chuckle, Lucy looking at her in surprise, and Dis smiled again, clearly amused. “It’s for the wedding night.”

            Lucy stared at the loose tangle of chain. Was there some kind of bondage involved in the consummation of a Dwarvish marriage? Or did this just go over her robes? “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

            Koli took mercy on her, stepping forward and lifting the piece from her hands. “You wear it like so,” she explained, holding it up against Lucy’s torso. “Do you see?”

            And, looking down, Lucy saw quite suddenly that it was some kind of harness. A very provocative, bejeweled . . . realizing that she was looking at Dwarvish lingerie, Lucy felt a jolt of alarm. _Dis_ was standing not five feet away, trying to hide her smile by stroking her beard, just like Thorin did.

            Koli, unaware of Lucy’s acute mortification, set down the harness and held up another piece, this time holding the metal against Lucy’s hips. “I can already tell it will look very well on,” she observed cheerfully. “You’ve lovely skin for the mithril, lady.”

            “Thank you,” Lucy replied automatically. It was also good manners that prevented her from backing away. That and her awareness of the amount of heavy furniture between herself and the closed stone door. How insane would Dis think her for bolting, even if she managed the maneuver in a timely fashion?

            She’d have to avoid the dam for weeks, and with only weeks left until the wedding and a horrifying amount of planning to accomplish, that wasn’t feasible.

            Lucy resigned herself to being fitted for her trousseau with Dis in attendance just as Koli stepped back, requesting matter-of-factly, “If you’ll just remove your clothing, lady, we’ll have the fitting done before you can say – well, I don’t suppose you _could_ say it, actually. Are you learning Khuzdul, if I may ask?”

            Distracted from the prospect of stripping by the question, Lucy answered, “After the wedding.” Then she remembered that Dwarves were generally accommodating even if they disliked her, and Koli seemed to be friendly. “Is it _really_ necessary to remove my clothes?” she asked lightly, smiling. “You know we humans can be a little odd about that.”

            Koli’s brow creased, but Dis answered. “It is necessary because the jewelry will be worn next to the skin, with only that contact to bear its weight. If not properly fitted, it may slip off.”

            _Wonderful_.

            “I could step out,” Dis suggested.

            Lucy had two options: revealing skin, or revealing weakness. She chose skin without thinking. “No, of course not, but thank you.”

            Robes first, fairly easy. Socks, Lucy assumed, could be kept, and the stone floors were sometimes chilly despite all innovations of dwarvish design, so she shed her leggings. Then her tunic. Then her shirt. Then chestcloth. She was reaching for her smalls when Koli tapped her wrist.

            “Those can stay,” she said, combing Lucy’s body with a reassuringly clinical gaze. “Usually not, but your smallclothes are _very_ small.”

            Lucy was relieved enough to laugh. She couldn’t explain that she’d wear bikini briefs if given the choice, and, not given it, had fashioned the next best thing.

            Dis, who had been eyeing the discarded chestcloth with curiosity, looked up at this remark, and laid eyes on what of Lucy’s scars could be seen from the front. Any lingering amusement at her daughter-in-law’s predicament vanished.

            “Very handsome scars,” she noted, as Koli lifted the harness and gestured for Lucy to reach through. She could see perhaps a dozen, mostly burns of a regular shape. Stray cuts. At some point, it seemed, her son’s beloved had taken a knife to the ribs.

            Lucy glanced through the chain loops and briefly met her gaze. “Thank you.”

            The piece settled into place with no feeling of weight at all. At Koli’s direction, Lucy shrugged a few times, feeling the cool chain ripple against her skin. It was a surprisingly pleasant feeling, strangely not unlike silk.

            Koli frowned at she surveyed the lay of the metal. “It does not fall over your chest as I expected it to,” she observed. “Princess, may I ask who took the measurements you gave me?”

            “This contraption caused the difference,” Dis explained, implicating the chestcloth.

            Koli regarded the approximation of a bra with surprise. “It’s for strenuous activity,” Lucy volunteered, used to the reaction. “Running, climbing, fighting.”

            “Is it not uncomfortable?”

            Even years later, the sense memory of taking a twelve-foot drop without it made Lucy’s nipples twinge painfully. She suppressed a cringe. “Not nearly as uncomfortable as being without.”

            Koli regained her professionalism. “Well, whatever the reason, adjustments must be made.” She busied herself with small, hooking pins, doubling up lengths of chain, using threads to mark where more links were needed. Inside of a minute, Lucy felt the harness shifting in shape, drawing tighter, closer to her skin. She studied the fireplace over Koli’s head more or less the way she used to study the ceiling of the gynecologist’s office: idly, but with the hair-raising expectation of sudden pinching sensations. Delicate or not, Lucy wasn’t used to having chains anywhere near her nipples.

            Dis moved closer as Koli worked, offering a murmured comment here or there, plucking at a wreath that fell in the wrong spot, smoothing out kinks in the chain.

            Lucy turned around when prompted, resigned to any exclamations that might be made, but no gasps of shock issued. Koli had seen war wounds of all description; Dis had heard an account of the damage inflicted from Thorin. The princess studied the results closely, her eye catching on the curve of bone that had healed improperly, counting the stripes laid in by a studded whip. It seemed that strength of every kind was written into Lucy’s body, and she wondered why the Human endeavored to hide so much of it beneath her clothing. Dwarves would boast of such weathered trials, of such sound bones and ready muscle. She lifted her gaze to the back of Lucy’s head, curious, trying to divine the thoughts behind the messy hair.

            Dis did not dislike Lucy, though she knew that the Woman was unsure of her place in Dis’ regard. The princess was simply put off by the fact that Lucy so resisted Dis’ attempts to understand her. Often, Lucy didn’t even offer active resistance; it seemed she was difficult to understand by nature.

            As the fitting wore on, Lucy was relieved to find that nothing pinched at all. Her greatest trepidations regarded the lower-body piece, but she found that the design circumvented her most sensitive area entirely. The more she studied the ‘lingerie’, the more she came around to it. The mithril did look good against her skin, something about the contrast making it seem rosier than usual, and the gems were all so small that none detracted attention from her body. The draping lines were elegant, highlighting the underlying structures of muscle and bone, playing up her curves.

            Kili, Lucy predicted with satisfaction, was going to lose his mind. Present company, however, had her mind quickly swerving off of that track, although the fact that Kili’s mother was present for this event didn’t seem quite so awkward anymore. Lucy directed a beaming smile her way. “It’s perfect,” she said, meaning it. “Thank you so much.”

            Dis smiled back, and for the first time, Lucy could detect no restraint, politeness, or artifice about the expression. “You’re very welcome,” she replied, pleased by the Lucy’s momentary transparency. As Koli stepped back, declaring the fit perfect, Dis stepped forward to help Lucy out of the jewelry that now prickled with pins.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Timeline recap.   
> if you recall, Lucy spent the remainder of fall and all of winter abroad after the BOFA, returning in the early spring. If you recall, I once mentioned that Kili and Lucy formerly announced their engagement on the following Durin's Day, because Lucy wanted a long engagement and New Year's seemed an apt date because it is a significant both publicly and to them.  
> They get married on the first eve of winter, but I haven't decided whether or not to write the ceremony itself yet, or just the wedding night. ;)  
> This story takes place shortly after Durin's Day, after Lucy has lived in Erebor with Kili for about six months, when the engagement is official. Dis realizes that Lucy has no family to support the bridal traditions (nor does Lucy seem to have the inclination or experience to do so for herself). Dis therefore decides to assume that responsibility for herself, in order to learn more about her indecipherable incipient-daughter-in-law.


	17. Erda

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As suggested by Vanafindiel, a romance for Fili - or rather, the very beginning of one. It will turn out well for him, don't worry.  
> Incidentally, this chapter is chock-full of brotherly love. :)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Time and place are more or less self-evident. The name and its meaning are fabricated, for which I hope I can be forgiven.

            Fili had had a very long day. His morning had gone well enough until he left his room; then a bucket of water carefully propped on the lintel had drenched him to the skin. He’d had to go back inside to change, which made him just late enough meeting his uncle that Thorin had given him an ominous frown but no verbal rebuke.

            He owed Kili an inconvenience, but his brother had never been easily troubled, and ever since Lucy’s return, Kili had been truly impossible to ruffle. At first, Fili had supposed that her effect would wear off in a few months, but so far it had been half a year and they were both still as giddy as the day Lucy turned up again.

            He didn’t understand it, and Fili didn’t like the feeling of not understanding his brother, or the feeling of not being the person closest to him. He wasn’t envious, but he could not fathom how easily Kili forgave Lucy’s long absence, or how quickly and intractably she had worked her way into Kili’s affections. The entire thing made him uncomfortable.

            The day grew worse when, around noon, Thorin sighed and turned from the construction they surveyed to survey Fili instead. “Let us adjourn to eat,” he suggested. As his uncle was never the one to suggest any kind of reprise from work, Fili was immediately alarmed. He looked to Balin for some hint of reassurance or agreement, but the advisor only gave him a bland smile in return. It bolstered his unease.

            His mother also joined them for the noon meal, although Dwalin, Kili, and Lucy were conspicuously absent. The occasion, as it turned out, was that Dain Ironfist had proposed a marriage between one of his nieces and Fili.

            It seemed appropriate. A niece for a nephew. A chance to soothe the injured feelings from the Battle of Five Armies, to secure relations.

            Thorin was obviously unhappy with the idea, but it was just as obvious that he thought it the best course of action. Dis was as inscrutable as always. Balin was comforting, almost consoling, but both were unnecessary. Fili had no lover, so secret affections. He had always known that this might happen, though the practice was not as common as it was with Human royalty.

            They all urged him to think about it, told him that there was no obligation to accept. It was mentioned that his prospective betrothed was plain in aspect, but by all accounts lively, cheerful, charitable.

            Fili suspected that he could easily reconcile himself to a homely wife, even a homely and dour wife instead of a plain and cheerful wife – but one more ‘lively’ individual in his life would be his undoing. Visions of perpetually missing socks and sugar in the salt shaker filled his minds’ eye.

            He left the small meeting when bid, to mull it over. Thorin suggested he take the rest of the day for just that purpose, and continue to think it over for the rest of the week at least.

            A betrothal. A marriage. To whom? What more was there to Dain’s niece than the little he’d been told? Did she laugh easily or rarely? How, exactly, was she charitable? Fili knew he’d been told her name, but he’d forgotten it already. Perhaps he was more unsettled by the proposal than he’d thought. He could use a talk with his brother – there was really no one else to talk to. Warriors didn’t much discuss their feelings; they shouldn’t need to. Fili and Kili had always been close enough, though, that that didn’t much matter to either of them . . . he _supposed_ that still held true.

            Fili walked as he mulled, with no particular destination in mind, and looked up at the sound of his brother’s laughter with relief. His spirits sank again, though, as soon as he saw Kili – being carried pick-a-back by Lucy, of all absurd things. She was dripping sweat and breathing heavily from the effort, which was admirable; Dwarves weighed far more than a casual observer would guess, and they looked heavy enough even to that.

            “Come on, you said you’d make it a half mile _at_ _least._ ”

            Lucy made a rude sound that was undeniably a snort, apparently unable to speak, and then seemed to notice Fili. He didn’t let his scowl show, but he couldn’t manage his usual smile. “Hey,” she rasped, breathless.

            “What in Mahal’s name are you two doing?” he asked. He knew he was being unpleasant but couldn’t seem to help himself.

            Lucy looked taken aback by his greeting, which made him feel badly, but Kili ignored it. “Hello, stroppy,” he hailed cheerfully. “We’re settling an argument. Care to witness?”

            “I do not,” Fili said shortly. Where had Lucy’s shirt gotten to? The scars on her stomach made the skin of his twitch sympathetically, though she seemed too winded to notice. Usually, she noticed other people noticing her scars at every instance, and so swiftly it seemed unnatural. It had taken months of wheedling from Kili, Nori, and Ori, and turns at the forge, before she’d take it off at all. “Are you both entirely incapable of behaving like adults?” he added, to stop himself from thinking about what forms Kili’s wheedling had likely taken behind closed doors.

            “Yes,” Kili said, and Lucy promptly dumped him on the floor. He landed with a thump and a shout of surprise, and Lucy hardly had doubled over with her hands on her knees, breathing heavily, before Kili had hooked one foot around her ankle and brought her down on top of him.

            “Did he try to insult us, Luce?” Kili asked her. Lucy, despite the breathlessness that was now concerning Fili despite himself, huffed out a laugh.

            “He’ll have to try harder than that, Kee.” The look she gave Fili from the floor, however, was sympathetic, as if she were acknowledging that Fili had called Kili by that nickname first.

            It didn’t make hearing her use it any more tolerable.

            Nor did it help that Kili seemed to suddenly notice that Fili was upset and not merely irritated. “Are you alright?” he asked in surprise, hauling himself up onto his elbows. Everyone else on the walkway streamed around the trio like water around a rock, although water didn’t usually give rocks sidelong, disapproving looks.

            “I’m quite fine,” Fili snapped, which was untrue, and not what he’d wanted to say.           “Don’t be an ass,” Lucy said, her voice still breathier than usual. She hauled herself to her feet with almost none of her usual grace, the effect something like a bear rolling onto its paws. “Talk. I’ll finish out the mile alone.”

            She gave Kili an affectionate little kick, more of a nudge, and was off, if doggedly. “Oh, it’s a mile now, is it?” Kili called after her, and grinned when Lucy made a rude gesture over her shoulder without looking back. Fili grimaced; he wasn’t the only passerby to take note, or offense. Dis and Thorin would hear about that one.

            He looked back at Kili to find his brother studying him critically, still sprawled on the ground. His brother seemed doomed to a perpetual adolescence, betrothal or no. “Male or female, then?” Kili asked, flip as ever.

            Fili considered. The niece was female, obviously, but Dain was the real problem. “Complicated,” he ruled, and offered his brother a hand up.

            He was irritated again when Kili looked the way Lucy had gone, but mollified when he said, “Pity she took off, then. Lucy’s good for complicated. “

            “Likely because she is,” Fili thought aloud, and though it could have begun an argument, instead it somehow served as a peacemaker.         

            They found their way back to the royal quarters, to speak without being overheard, and settled on the lip of a fountain in one of the communal areas. Kili fidgeted as he listened – picking at a loose thread, untying his bootlaces, retying them, poking at the water to make ripples.

            His first question was not what Fili expected. “Do you think you could be happy?” Kili asked bluntly, squinting at him.

            “Happy,” Fili repeated. It wasn’t the sort of question he’d expect anyone to ask him – where had it come from? _Lucy._ Of course. Lucy would ask that question, odd as she was. He resented the query immediately, for that reason, but Kili pressed onwards. “Well, that’s why you’re worried, isn’t it?” he insisted. “You think she’d make you unhappy.”

            Fili looked down. He’d unraveled some of the braid on his robes as he spoke, though he didn’t remember doing it. “I suppose,” he said.

            “Lucy makes me happy,” Kili said quietly, trying to soften the blow by posing it mildly. He dropped a picked-off thread into the water.

            “Lucy makes you addled,” Fili corrected, a bit testily, but Kili only offered him a lopsided grin.

            “Yeah, she does, but addled is a bit much to ask for. I’d just be glad to see you happy again.”

            “I’m happy,” Fili objected, though he wasn’t sure why.

            “No, you’re not. You’re no good for larks at all, ever since the Battle. Before, even. Even before the Quest.” That surprised Fili. He felt displaced by Lucy, however much he denied jealousy, and Lucy had not been in their lives before the Quest. “It’s gotten worse since then,” Kili conceded, “but it started long ago.”

            “It’s called growing up,” Fili said dryly.

            “No, it’s not,” Kili countered, with surprising passion. “Do you want to be Thorin, Fili? He’s a good Dwarf and a great King, but when’s the last we saw him smile? You could be Dwalin, instead – he’s a respectable _adult_ , but he smiles when he’s with Nori. He jokes from time to time. Laughs, even. You can see how much Dori loves his brothers, how much Gloin loves his wife and son.”

            “None of them are kings,” Fili mumbled, frowning at the intricate knots carved into the lip of the fountain.

            “If you’re going to be unhappy, do it for a good reason,” Kili advised sharply. “Do it because the Battle scarred us all, or because you sleep alone, but don’t do it because you think misery is your lot. It’s _not_ expected of you, much less needed.”

            Fili brooded for a moment. “You weren’t always this clever,” he observed grudgingly.

            Kili grinned as readily as ever, extended the foot he’d braced against their seat to shove at Fili’s knee. “I’d swear it’s from sleeping with her.”

            “Kili!” Fili complained, shoving back, but he was laughing along with his brother.

            “I meant _sleeping_ , actual sleep!” Kili protested. “Spend that much time around someone, whole nights, you’d think something would transfer. Or maybe she puts something in my pipeweed – I’ve no earthly idea, really.”

            Fili subsided into chuckles, and Kili flicked the water’s surface again, watching the larger ripples from the fountain’s spout absorb the small ripples he created. “We talk for hours,” he added, more seriously. “I’d wager that’s it.”

            “Hours?” Fili echoed.

            “Yeah. Some nights, we’ve started talking in bed and not fallen to sleep until dawn. We could talk for days. Until our throats hurt. She doesn’t think like anyone else, you know.”

            Kili hooked his chin over his knee, thoughtful, and Fili studied the unfamiliar expression on his face, wondering if he could speak with Dain’s niece for hours, if she thought differently than he did for coming from a different place. He wondered what it was like to stay awake with someone all through the night not for security’s sake, but because their voice called more sweetly than sleep. He wondered how it felt to realize that dawn was coming, the sun creeping over the hills, and to entertain a lover’s borrowed ideas instead of dreams.

            Fili shook himself because it was an absurd line of thought, flowery and poetic, more like the mind-numbing ramblings of the elves in Rivendell than it was like any useful rumination on his dilemma.

            Still, he couldn’t entirely shake the notion. _Erda_ , he remembered suddenly. The niece’s name was Erda. It was an unusual name, a feminine form a Khuzdul word for a certain kind of strength, an architectural strength that was necessary to structures such as foundations, or weight-bearing beams. It was not a concept easily expressed in Westron, nor was it commonly used as a name for either gender.

            Erda. Fili decided that he liked it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My life is chaos. I apologize for my irregular posting, and while I wouldn't feel honest saying anything about the timing of future posts, I will say that I am determined to follow through with this endeavor - I will see this fic through to at least the firstborn child, my cat as my witness!


	18. Shelter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So, I actually wrote this about halfway through the first piece, for pretty much no reason, and proceeded to forget about it until now. It's set way back in the day, when Lucy was about twenty-one and had just arrived in Middle Earth. Throwback Thursday! This counts, right?

It was impossible to tell if the girl had always been an odd creature, or if her spirit had been bent out of its usual shape by her ordeal. Her large dark eyes were solemn, though bright with intelligence and reflected light. For the first three days, they had been dull, glazed, when they opened – which was rarely. She had been incoherent, semiconscious, feverish and drugged by pain. Beorn wasn’t particularly relieved to see those eyes focused and clear. He had taken in the girl the way he took in any injured creature – although, since she was a Human and not a helpless animal, his care for her had been more perfunctory than anything else. He’d tended her dutifully, with the best of his skill and resources, but without real concern.  
She didn’t speak for another day, until he asked her name, and when she spoke, her voice was a croak, her throat still raw from days or weeks of screaming. She said her name was Lucy Bell, and he had no cause or care to doubt her.  
Beorn was surprised at the slight weight of her unobtrusive gaze. Perhaps because she lacked anything else to do, Lucy watched him closely. She watched him like the wounded animals always did – intently but without intent, wary but not really afraid. That was what unsettled him. He had had Humans in his hall before, and none had comported themselves with the still, silent patience of animals. They watched him fearfully, angrily, or with disgust, chattered nervously, burst out in fear or misdirected rage. They were impatient and uncomfortable, intrusive even when they said and did nothing. Their presences had chafed at him.  
But this girl did none of that, and he softened towards her. She was very young, in his estimation, and had been through the likes of the very trials that killed so many of his kind, and she was that odd sort of animal-like – not at all unintelligent, but more like one of Beorn’s wise companions, or himself, than like others of her own kind. He would almost have suspected that she was a different race of Skinchanger if the others had not been driven from Middle Earth even before his own people.  
Beorn considered the possibility that the Orcs had wrung the Human gumption right out of her, but in his experience those of the Free People who’d tangled with the Orcs, as Lucy and himself had, either burned with hatred or burned out entirely. They were in embers, he decided, the day that the girl had regained enough of her strength to stand. Her muscles trembled more with pain than effort, he supposed, because while she gripped his forearm, she didn’t lean on him.   
They were both in embers. Not burned to ash, but not flaming brightly, either. It explained the steadiness of Lucy’s gaze, behind the pain and the fear that rose up anew when the wind knocked the window shutter against the wall or an ox stamped its hoof against the floor or something moved too quickly at the edges of her vision. Her gaze was steady and determined, her eyes almost always framing her strange calm.  
“Why do you save me?” she asked the first time she went outside, on the ninth day. She had not spoken before, except to state her name. The words were spoken carefully, around an unfamiliar accent.  
The sun was on her face and in her hair, making the first seem even paler and the second darker except where it caught light like honey in its strands. Her jawline was firmer now than it had been, her determination gaining strength, and he supposed that it might overpower her quietude, that she might become more like his expectation of a Human, and less like the strange creature he had seen so far.  
“Because you were alone and hurt,” Beorn replied, not surprised by the question. Others always suspected ugly motives, even some animals. “Because I hate the Orcs.”  
Lucy looked at the manacle on his wrist. “I see you change,” she said. It startled him, and made his guard rise – no one cared for his kind, especially not now, as their memory faded into misguided legend, hateful myths. “The window. I do not care where you go at night. I just wanted to breathe fresh air for a minute, and I saw.” She looked out over the valley again, her eyes moving over the mountains he had brought her back from. “That is metal like theirs.” Black iron. It occurred to him that she did not know those words.  
He was quiet for a moment, unsure how best to explain so that she would understand. Lucy met his gaze, considering him. “I am alone, too,” she said, and although there were thousands and thousands of Humans in Middle Earth, he did not contest her claim to isolation. There were infinite ways to be alone. Who was to say which was more devastating than the next? He certainly had no idea if it was worse to be the last of your kind, or to be surrounded by hundreds and completely unclaimed. 

 

Beorn taught her more Westron at her request, her strange accent quickly falling away, her grammar becoming quickly flawless, her speaking easy. She spoke the Black Speech with terrifying fluidity, her throat flexing around the harsh vowels and sharp consonants more successfully than any other non-Orc he’d heard. The sound made the both of them shudder, but he didn’t need to ask why she’d learned. To survive, one would do almost anything.  
It must have been an Orc who taught her the first shreds of Westron, too, but he did not ask and she did not speak of it.  
His strange guest also demonstrated an aptitude for his own language that surprised him, though it shouldn’t have, not after she had voiced the unnatural speech of Orcs so easily. It was indulgent to teach her, begun on a whim – he had not heard another speak his language in decades, and even the girl’s too-high voice, initially awkward in its syntax and pronunciation, brought tears to sting unshed behind his eyes.   
The speed with which she learned was almost preternatural, and Beorn understood now how she had survived so long under the black-iron yoke. She was fiercely intelligent. He doubted that she had been taught Black Speech at all, that she hadn’t learned it by listening closely to her captors, through the terror and agony and darkness, pretending to sleep, learning their ways and their weaknesses and their secrets.   
She regained more of her mind with every day, her scattered wits regrouping in ways that startled and sometimes baffled Beorn – her grasp of his language’s grammar expanding in leaps and bounds, her folding of paper into various representations of animal forms that defied explanation, her strangely intense contemplation of what few maps he owned, her face tense and closed-off with concentration. The calm was still there, but now it was masked by the return of emotion.  
Her determination increased at nearly the same speed – she shed her bandages on the sixteenth day and went bare in the sunlight and mountain air, her aspen-white skin turning vulnerably pink and then a far more respectable shade of pale brown that approximated the color of pine beneath the bark. The skin of her back was still more or less raw, though no longer weeping pus and blood, the deepest wounds almost unchanged while the most shallow had already sealed over into flaking pink scars that bleached in the sunlight.  
Lucy gave no indication that she would leave anytime soon, and Beorn was glad. It was good to have someone beyond his animals – beloved though they were to him, and wise, they could not speak aloud with him, or share his table, or play a game of sticks, or any of a dozen other, less easily defined things. Lucy had quickly become a presence that seemed permanent – assisting with what chores she was able, sleeping innocently in his bed, curled up on the hearth in the evenings with a blanket and a mug of tea so large in her hands that it made her seem younger to him than he suspected she really was. She looked like a child to him, yes, but her eyes were old. Beorn suspected that they had been so long before the Orcs had a chance to age her, because her steadiness was not something born of trauma – it was something that withstood trauma, something that allowed her to do so more or less intact, because the nights that she woke him up whimpering, still dreaming, were few, and the occasions that he saw her tears were even rarer.  
Beorn dared to hope that she wouldn’t move on. That, alone as she claimed to be, she would choose to stay in this place. She would become as much a part of life as the valley and the bees and the orchard and the animals. He would wake every morning to the small smile that she had begun offering, if rarely, and he would hear her singing in the garden every day, and he would always have someone to talk to and read with and walk with, someone who did not fear him; someone who understood loneliness and the darkness of Orcs’ caves and the pure, holy beauty of the summer sky. Lucy seemed to, when she turned her face up to it. She appeared to be briefly, and only in those moments, at peace.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't read this as romantic, but Lucy awakening a desire for companionship of some kind ties in nicely to the canon of Beorn seeking out a life partner later on.


End file.
